The Gates of the Alamo [Hardcover]

Stephen Harrigan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 29, 2000

A huge, riveting, deeply imagined novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo, an event that formed the consciousness of Texas and that resonates through American history. With its vibrant, unexpected characters and its richness of authentic detail, The Gates of the Alamo is an unforgettable re-creation of a time, a place, and a heroic conflict.

The time is 1835. At the center of a canvas crowded with Mexicans and Americans, with Karankawa and Comanche Indians, with settlers of many nationalities, stand three people whose fortunes quickly become our urgent concern: Edmund McGowan, a naturalist of towering courage and intellect, whose life's work is threatened by the war against Mexico and whose character is tested by his own dangerous pride; Mary Mott, a widowed innkeeper on the Texas coast, a determined and resourceful woman; and her sixteen-year-old son, Terrell, whose first shattering experience with love leads him instead to war, and into the crucible of the Alamo.

As Edmund McGowan and Mary Mott take off in pursuit of Terrell and follow him into the fortress, the powerful but wary attraction between them deepens. And the reader is drawn with them into the harrowing days of the battle itself.

Never before has the fall of the Alamo been portrayed with such immediacy. And for the first time the story is told not just from the perspective of the American defenders but from that of the Mexican attackers as well. We follow Blas Montoya, a sergeant in an elite sharpshooter company, as he fights to keep his men alive not only in the inferno of battle but also during the long forced march north from Mexico proper to Texas. And through the eyes of the ambitious mapmaker Telesforo Villasenor, we witness the cold deliberations of General Santa Anna.

Filled with dramatic scenes, abounding in fictional and historical personalities -- among them James Bowie, David Crockett, and William Travis -- The Gates of the Alamo enfolds us in history, and through its remarkable and passionate storytelling allows us to participate at last in an American legend.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A novel about the Alamo promises as much suspense as a movie about the Titanic: we already know how it's going to end. The bloody siege of the Alamo was, of course, not only the defining crisis in the Texan struggle for independence from Mexico but also an event that secured martyrdom for the 200 or so men who died there and transformed a dusty Franciscan mission into a national shrine, an American Troy. As with all mythologized chronicles, however, the Battle of the Alamo ultimately resolves into mundane fact, a catalog of human error, ego, and heroism. And it is these details that Stephen Harrigan regards in his broad and powerful third novel, The Gates of the Alamo.

Passing lightly over the oft-profiled Alamo stalwarts--Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and the young commander William Travis--Harrigan focuses on fictional secondaries, primarily botanist Edmund McGowan and mother and son Mary and Terrell Mott. Rigidly devoted to his work, Edmund straddles the fence in the dispute over Texas, even as war murmurs grow. But when he meets widowed Mary, who maintains her small inn with a steady, gentle resourcefulness, his good nature pulls him steadily into the inevitable conflict. Mary herself is forced to quarter Mexican soldiers; and then, as she watches incredulously, her young son seeks to test himself in the erupting skirmishes. Eventually the trio find themselves inside the Alamo during the nearly two-week battle, their various conciliations frustrated by the surrounding mayhem.

Harrigan's Texas is an uncertain, dangerous jostling of peoples, a place where disaster threatens too frequently, where practical knowledge is paramount and political ambivalence untenable, and where a primal beauty appears often as if by magic: "Hundreds and hundreds of lush gray cranes ... spanned the sky almost from horizon to horizon, and the whole procession moved with the quiet, ordained manner in which events unfold in a dream." However, the emblematic significance of the Alamo itself remains inscrutable. As Mary tends to the dying, watching hope turn to hopelessness, she can only respond to Travis's rallying orations with disillusionment: "She had heard enough of these empty patriotic effusions by now to feel that the Alamo was nothing but a sinking island of rhetoric." The Gates of the Alamo nonetheless sweeps us into the many and variegated smaller stories that compose the larger one. It's a book to remember. --Ben Guterson

From Publishers Weekly

Settling his fictional cast firmly at the heart of 19th-century Texas, novelist Harrigan (Jacob's Well) retells the story of the Alamo with consummate skill, weaving a wealth of historical detail into a tight, moving human drama. Mary Mott, honest widow and frontier innkeeper near the Gulf Coast; her 16-year-old son, Terrell; an itinerant, fiercely independent botanist named Edmund McGowan; and a small collection of soldiers in Santa Anna's army are among those whose lives are disrupted as factions within the rebellious Mexican state unite in the common cause of independence. In a serpentine plot that never runs dull, Harrigan traces the growing war fever, beginning in 1835, neatly avoiding political debate by presenting the various arguments plainly from each point of view. When Terrell runs away after an emotionally disturbed girl, who is pregnant with his child, commits suicide, his mother and McGowan follow after him. All three wind up in the Alamo and are caught in the futile and ill-conceived 1836 battle on the outskirts of San Antonio de B?xar. Faced with the formidable chore of handling such monumental legends as William Travis, James Bowie, David Crockett, Sam Houston and, of course, Santa Anna, Harrigan takes a judicious middle path, treating them respectfully but not smoothing over their flaws. Strict traditionalists may bridle at the deft ease with which Harrigan manipulates the bloody siege to allow a sentimental conclusion to his novel, and exacting historians may note his glossing of Mexican tactics in the final storming of the old mission, though the gore and guts of 19th-century combat are faithfully rendered. Yet Harrigan has crafted a compulsively readable historical drama on a grand scale, peopled with highly believable frontier personalities--Mexican as well as American--and suffused with period authenticity. 100,000 first printing; 11-city author tour. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (February 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679447172
• ISBN-13: 978-0679447177
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (101 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #285,931 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stephen Harrigan was born in Oklahoma City in 1948 and has lived in Texas since the age of five, growing up in Abilene and Corpus Christi.
For many years he was a staff writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly, and his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of other publications as well, including The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Audubon, Travel Holiday, Life, American History, National Geographic and Slate. Many of his magazine pieces have been collected in the essay collections A Natural State (1988) and Comanche Midnight (1995). Another non-fiction book, Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992.
Harrigan is the author of four novels. His first novel, Aransas, published by Alfred A. Knopf, was listed by the New York Times as a notable book of 1980. Jacob's Well was published by Simon and Schuster in 1984 and cited as one of the year's best books by The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News. In 2000, Knopf published his novel The Gates of the Alamo, which became a New York Times bestseller and notable book, and which received a number of awards, including the TCU Texas Book Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Spur Award for the Best Novel of the West. In April 2006, Knopf published Challenger Park, a novel about a woman astronaut torn between her responsibilities as a mother and her dreams of flying in space. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Thomas Mallon called Challenger Park "a fine, absorbing achievement, probably the best science-factual novel about the space-faring worlds of Houston and Cape Canaveral in the nearly half-century since the first astronauts were chosen." His latest novel, Remember Ben Clayton, will be published by Knopf in May 2011.
Among the many movies Harrigan has written for television are HBO's award-winning The Last of His Tribe, starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene, and King of Texas, a western retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear for TNT, which starred Patrick Stewart, Marcia Gay Harden, and Roy Scheider. His most recent television production was The Colt, an adaptation of a short story by the Nobel-prize winning author Mikhail Sholokhov, which aired on The Hallmark Channel. For his screenplay of The Colt, Harrigan was nominated for a Writers Guild Award and the Humanitas Prize. Young Caesar, a feature adaptation of Conn Iggulden's "Emperor" novels, which he co-wrote with William Broyles, Jr., is currently in development with Exclusive Media, with Burr Steers attached to direct.
A 1971 graduate of the University of Texas, Harrigan lives in Austin, where he is a faculty fellow at UT's James A. Michener Center for Writers. He is also a founding member of the Texas Book Festival, and of Capital Area Statues, Inc., a non-profit organization that commissions and raises money for monumental works of sculpture celebrating the history and culture of Texas. He and his wife, Sue Ellen, have three daughters, Marjorie, Dorothy and Charlotte, and two grandchildren, Mason and Travis.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A Work of historical fiction which reads like a thriller", March 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Gates of the Alamo (Hardcover)

After publishing two wonderful, critically acclaimed novels in the `80s ("Aransas" and "Jacob's Well"), Stephen Harrigan seemed to drop off of the literary map. But his time was well spent, writing books of essays ("Commanche Night") and teleplays ("The Last of His Tribe," "Cleopatra") while researching his latest and third novel, "At the Gates of the Alamo," a work of historical fiction which reads like thriller and will have thousands of Americans glued to their seats as they reevaluate that legendary event in our history. Harrigan frames his story with a 1911 parade in San Antonio, as former Mayor Terrell Mott, the last surviving "hero" of the Alamo, takes a place of honor in the procession. Terrell's recollections of that time lead into the main story, featuring Terrell his mother Mary, and a botanist named Ed McGowan as protagonists. Beginning in the months before the citizens of Texas begin their fight for independence, Harrigan's narrative sets the stage for the coming siege with descriptions of violence that were almost commonplace during the time. An attack by Karankawa Indians is rendered in prose that mixes matter-of-fact detail with nearly poetic description: "He raised his war club, and in a strange suspension of time she studied him as if he were a subject sitting for a portrait: the shell gorget at his beautiful neck, the blue circles tattooed over his cheekbones, the rattlesnake rattles whirring at the end of his braid." After meeting up briefly with Mary Mott and her son Terrell (not to mention Jim Bowie) along the Texas coast, McGowan heads to Mexico City in order to secure more money to complete his _Flora Texana_, a journal identifying the various species of plants and flowers throughout Mexico. At the same time, Bowie and his followers head north in order to join brief skirmishes against the Mexican Army (Steven Austin, the founder of the independence movement, has been jailed in Mexico City). McGowan's journey brings him full circle, just in time to inadvertently get involved with the defenders of the Alamo - among them, Terrell Mott. Although the story of the Alamo is a familiar one, Harrigan lends it new importance by including recently discovered facts in his narrative, such as Crockett's leaving the Alamo during the siege to enlist more defenders. What's more, historical figures are presented in a realistic light: Jim Bowie comes off as a schemer always in search of a quick fortune; Col. Travis is brash and full of bravado; former congressman David Crockett can't seem to shake the habit of politicking; and Sam Houston is a scheming, devious man of questionable fortitude. Mary Mott's observations of Houston, after the Alamo, are telling: "In order to help the `forted up' men in the Alamo, Houston would have had to abandon his own plans and subvert his own ambition, and men such as he did not do such things, no matter the cost in lives." Harrigan intermingles his fictional characters with the historical creating a work of seamless beauty. The Mexican characters - like Sgt. Blas Montoya, or Lt. Telesforo Villasenor - are handled with the same amount of care, so that when the battle comes the reader is equally moved by deaths on both sides. And the ongoing (on and off) relationship between Mary Mott and Ed McGowan never slides into maudlin territory. Great historical novels should present their revelations about the past within the context of a story that is both riveting and believable. Harrigan's "At the Gates of the Alamo" does all that and more. (copyright 2000, DTS/St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wide audience will enjoy this book., March 2, 2000

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gates of the Alamo (Hardcover)

From the first page this large and satisfying book, you know you are in the hands of a master. Stephen Harrigan not only knows his Texas history like nobody's business, but he knows how to create characters we immediately care about, and finds the trick of building suspense around an historical event with a well-known outcome.

Using a mix of Northamerican, Mexican and Tejano characters both real and imagined, we see what life in Mexican Texas was like. One major character, Edmund McGowan, is a naturalist in the employ of the Mexican government who sees no reason to break away. The mysterious end to that income sends him to Mexico City to find out what's happened. The possible breakaway of Texas is the talk of the town, and although Edmund insists that many of Mexico's Texas citizens are perfectly happy (settlers had to become Mexican citizens and Catholics in order to own land) a Mexico City barber sets him straight: "Ah, but these days one can only be a Mexican in one's soul. It is very difficult to be a citizen when one's government is so inconstant." Also on this trip he meets Stephen Austin, fresh from prison following his latest attempt to have a rational dialogue with Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and Juan Almonte, an intelligent and powerful Mexican nobleman, all of whom will play major parts later in the book. McGowan's relationship with widow Mary Mott, who runs an inn on the Texas coast, adds a deep personal note to their troubled times, as does the tie between the Mexican sergeant Blas and a mysteries Maya girl.

The roster of character is large, but each one is sharply drawn and memorable. The siege of the Alamo is exciting and unromantic. Some of its heroes emerge as quite heroic, others portrayed as regular people fighting for their lives. The heroism is not confined to the defenders of the Alamo: many Mexican officers were horrified at Santa Anna's insistence on killing everyone in the fort.

I'm not sure I agree with that familiar bookending device of using a 1911 Alamo parade to encase the story, but what the heck, I was glad the book went on that much longer. Unlike the work of many journalists who turn to fiction, every page of Harrigan's novel is alive and vibrant.

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very good read, March 1, 2000

By 

John Bryant (College Station, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gates of the Alamo (Hardcover)

The Gates of the Alamo is a work of fiction set against the turbulent Texas Revolution and the Alamo in particular. While I am not normally a fan of ficticious works dealing with Texas history this book is the exception. Mr. Harrigan has done his research and taken us into the thirteen day siege in ways few have imagained. This is not Walt Disneys version. The characters are well thought out and human, their decisions are not always the right ones and life does not always have a happy ending. Seen through the eyes of both men and women, Anglo and Hispanic, soldiers and civilians Harrigan takes us through the horrors of war and lets us see that while the Alamo was heroic it wasn't antisceptic and battles really do bring out the worst in its participants. The author has taken the time to understand the different mind sets and attitudes concerning the Texas independence movement and has interwoven them into an interesting story that can be depended on to keep a readers interest and actually inform on many points. Mr. Harrigan has incorporated into his book recently discovered information about the battle that until now only serious researchers and Alamo historians have been aware of adding a deeper understanding of the siege to the casual reader. All in all a very good read that is enjoyable, disturbing, informative and highly recommended