Something big was coming. Jay Milner could feel it in 1961. Book critics recognized his first novel, Incident at Ashton, as a bold look at civil rights. He pocketed an advance for a second novel, quit the newspaper business, left New York, and headed to his native Texas to settle behind a typewriter and become, in his words, a "famous arther." Some people go a little mad trying to arrange words in brilliant order. Milner, a Lubbock boy who had become a top journalist in Mississippi and New York, couldn't get the second novel out of first gear. "I was spending too much time partying and talking about writing, but not writing," he said. Meanwhile, his first novel tanked. The publisher did little to promote it and then went out of business. Another book about southern bigotry, 1960's To Kill A Mockingbird, overshadowed Milner's effort.

So Milner returned to journalism and bonded with a revolutionary rabble of Texas writers who dubbed themselves Maddogs. Edwin "Bud" Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Billie Lee Brammer, Larry L. King, Dan Jenkins, Larry McMurtry, and others composed a support system for one another as they created a passel of distinctly Texan prose that ensured the Lone Star State's national mystique and their own counter-culture hero status.

Milner was a crack journalist and college journalism professor who is recalled with admiration by former students and top writers. Yet, almost four decades would pass before Milner's autobiographical and highly entertaining Confessions of a Maddog: A Romp Through the High-Flying Texas Music and Literary Era of the Fifties to the Seventies, was published in 1998 to warm reception. Inspired, Milner decided to write another novel.

Again, words became stubborn. "I've kind of lost my fire to be a famous arther, I guess," Milner said recently, taking a break from his daily habit of trying to craft at least one intriguing page on his word processor. "I'm tired. We had a pretty hard life, going night and day, for a lot of years." NEXT »

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