North to Yesterday (Texas Tradition Series) [Paperback]

Robert Flynn (Author), A. B. Guthrie Jr. (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Robert Flynn, professor emeritus, Trinity University and a native of Chillicothe, Texas, is the author of twelve books. Seven novels: North To Yesterday; In the House of the Lord; The Sounds of Rescue, The Signs of Hope; Wanderer Springs, The Last Klick, The Devil's Tiger, co-authored with the late Dan Klepper, and Tie-Fast Country. His dramatic adaptation of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying was the United States entry at the Theater of Nations in Paris in l964 and won a Special Jury Award. He is also the author of a two-part documentary, "A Cowboy Legacy" shown on ABC-TV; a nonfiction narrative, A Personal War in Vietnam, an oral history.
Also, When I Was Just Your Age, two story collections, Seasonal Rain and Living With The Hyenas, and a collection essays, Growing Up a Sullen Baptist. He is co-editor of Paul Baker and the Integration of Abilities.

Flynn also contributes to The Door: "The World's Pretty Much Only Magazine of Religious Satire." North to Yesterday received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times. Seasonal Rain, was co-winner of the Texas Literary Festival Award. Wanderer Springs received a Spur Award from Western Writers of America. Living With the Hyenas received a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Flynn's work has been translated into German, Spanish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Malayalam, Arabic, Tamil, Hindi, Kanada, and Vietnamese. Flynn is a member of The Texas Institute of Letters, The Writers Guild of America, Marine Corps Combat Correspondents, and P.E.N. In 1998, he received the "Distinguished Achievement Award" from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Robert Flynn is a native of Chillicothe, Texas, the best known Chillicothe outside of Ohio, Missouri and Illinois, despite its size. Chillicothe is so small there's only one Baptist Church. Chillicothe is so small you have to go to Quanah to have a coincidence. Chillicothe is fairly bursting with truth and beauty and at an early age Flynn set out to find it.

His life and work could be described as 'The Search for Morals, Ethics, Religion, or at least a good story in Texas and lesser known parts of the world'. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 340 pages
• Publisher: Texas Christian University Press (January 1, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875650155
• ISBN-13: 978-0875650159
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,175,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Flynn, professor emeritus, Trinity University and a native of Chillicothe, Texas, is the author of fourteen books. Nine novels: North To Yesterday; In the House of the Lord; The Sounds of Rescue, The Signs of Hope; Wanderer Springs, The Last Klick, The Devils Tiger, co-authored with the late Dan Klepper, Tie-Fast Country, Echos of Glory.and his most recent Jade:Outlaw. His dramatic adaptation of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying was the United States entry at the Theater of Nations in Paris in l964 and won a Special Jury Award. He is also the author of a two-part documentary, "A Cowboy Legacy" shown on ABC-TV; a nonfiction narrative, A Personal War in Vietnam, an oral history, When I was Just Your Age, and a memoir, Burying the Farm.

Also, three story collections, Seasonal Rain, Living With The Hyenas, Slouching Toward Zion, and a collection of essays, Growing Up a Sullen Baptist. He is co-editor of Paul Baker and the Integration of Abilities.

North to Yesterday received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times. Seasonal Rain, was co-winner of the Texas Literary Festival Award. Wanderer Springs received a Spur Award from Western Writers of America. Living With the Hyenas received a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Echoes of Glory received a Spur Award from Western Writers of America. Flynn's work has been translated into German, Spanish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Malayalam, Arabic, Tamil, Hindi, Kanada, and Vietnamese. Flynn is a member of The Texas Institute of Letters, The Writers Guild of America, Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Associate, and P.E.N. In 1998, he received the "Distinguished Achievement Award" from the Texas Institute of Letters. (See Flynn's Blog.)

Robert Flynn is a native of Chillicothe, Texas, the best known Chillicothe outside of Ohio, Missouri and Illinois, despite its size. Chillicothe is so small there's only one Baptist Church. Chillicothe is so small you have to go to Quanah to have a coincidence. Chillicothe is fairly bursting with truth and beauty and at an early age Flynn set out to find it.

His life and work could be described as 'The Search for Morals, Ethics, Religion, or at least a good story in Texas and lesser known parts of the world'.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Road not Taken--Texas Style, March 22, 2000

By 

Janet Harris - See all my reviews

This review is from: North to Yesterday (Texas Tradition) (Hardcover)

In his 1967 novel, Flynn uses the classic western myth of a trail drive to show how a man can, and cannot, return to a road not taken in his youth. Lampassas planned to test his courage by joining a trail drive north. But the young woman he admired convinced him that love and a home would be a better dream.

Years later when his wife dies and his son faces a life as a storekeeper like his father, Lampassas knows he has little time. He sells his store, surprises his son with a full-blown plan for a trail drive, and sweeps them off to follow his recaptured dream. He assembles a bedraggled crew of misfits and rounds up 2000 range cattle for the great adventure. Unprepared, under-capitalized, and unwilling to give up, this group of dreamers loses their horses and wind up "walking" the cattle to market. Arrival at the railhead proves disappointing since there has been no market for cattle for fifteen years, and the cattle are too scrawny by then to be worth anything except their hides. But the dream will not die.

Written almost 20 years before LONESOME DOVE, this novel captures the lure of the drive, where every man faces tests of courage and manhood, where every disaster can only be the prelude to success just over the hill.

With respect for his characters' quest, empathy for their refusal to abandon their dreams, and wry and hilarious humor, Flynn captures the American passion to be going somewhere, to be "satisfied for a while just to be on the trail." Readers who catch a glimpse of their own roads not taken will find themselves rooting for Lampassas and his motley crew to reach the trail's end, no matter what they find.

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent and Absurd, December 8, 2007

By 

Editor, Author, Publicist (Denver, Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: North to Yesterday (Texas Tradition Series) (Paperback)

"It is the first feller that does something that is the hero, and the last feller that does it that is the fool," Preacher tells Lampassas toward the end of this comic, sometimes tragic novel about some wonderful misfits and dreamers who made a belated drive of longhorn cattle from Texas to the railhead in Kansas.

Chief of the dreamers was Lampassas, a storekeeper who sold supplies to the longhorn drivers and listened to their bizarre stories and tall tales until he could envision every bend in the trail. Making the drive to Trails End was one of the great adventures of the old West; but when he and his odd company of hands finally act out this once-heroic role, Lampassas becomes a tragicomic hero, a kind of American Don Quixote living in the past.

The cowhands he assembles are inept, and the heroine tougher than the men, but all of them are chasing dreams: Pretty Shadow, the tough cowhand searching for the whore he once loved in Trails End and to whom he promised to return; Preacher, a self-ordained revivalist, who thinks the Lord meant him to save the sinners at Trails End; Gattis, the farm boy running away from cotton picking and the dour financee his parents had thrust on him; the man nicknamed June, a stable hand whose pistol is the cherished symbol of his manhood; the Kid, Lampassas's son, who would rather be a locomotive engineer than a cowboy; and above all the entrancing tomboy Covina, who ran away from home with her illegitimate child and hoped to make a living as a barmaid.

Lampassas, to whose fire and folly and utter weariness one is deeply drawn, holds the long drive together in the face of natural and man-made catastrophes, some nightmarish, some fatal, but many wildly funny. He is at once magnificent and absurd.

This novel compiles a rich cast of characters, each on the cattle drive for his own Quixotic reasons, each a dreamer himself. A great western tale spare in talk, bold in incidents, endearing of characters, this is a must read for all lovers of the American western.