Big Wonderful Thing

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world.

“I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.”

Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists―all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea.

Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes, it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

REVIEWS

"Harrigan, surveying thousands of years of history that lead to the banh mi restaurants of Houston and the juke joints of Austin, remembering the forgotten as well as the famous, delivers an exhilarating blend of the base and the ignoble, a very human story indeed. [Big Wonderful Thing is] as good a state history as has ever been written and a must-read for Texas aficionados." Kirkus, Starred Review

"Harrigan, essentially, is to Texas literature what Willie Nelson is to Texas music…Texas is an incredibly fascinating state―and Harrigan, who recognizes that the state's diversity is what makes it great, truly does it justice. Endlessly readable and written with great care, Big Wonderful Thing is just that." NPR

"The great strength of Harrigan’s work is that he tells the stories of all the types of people who have lived in Texas, from its earliest days into modern times, with a sense that all of their lives mattered in fashioning the state’s identity." New York Review of Books

"[Harrigan] has now given us a―no other word for it―Texas-sized book about the place he’s called home for decades. Lavishly illustrated, fully annotated, brimming with sass, intelligence, trenchant analysis, literary acumen and juicy details, it is a page-turner that can be read straight through or at random. It is big. It is popular history at its best." Wall Street Journal

"Harrigan uses his stupendous storytelling skills to great effect [in Big Wonderful Thing]. He covers the state's major historical events from inventive angles, introduces newly discovered archaeological and archival research, and excels at puffing up many of Texas's larger-than-life personalities.", Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

"Harrigan describes post-Columbian Texas in novelistic style in this eloquent homage to the Lone Star state...History lovers will enjoy this packed, fascinating account of a singular state." Publishers Weekly Published On: 2019-08-07

"The shelf that holds your Texana―T.R. Fehrenbach's 'Lone Star,' James Michener's fictionalized 'Texas'―may need to be reinforced. Harrigan…has a contender to sit beside those worthy tomes…Harrigan's Lone Star tales are embodied by people great and unknown, many of whom would not have registered in what he calls the 'revised standard version of Texas history.'" San Antonio Express-News Published

"Because it is so well told and because it embraces so much of the state’s charms and contradictions, Big Wonderful Thing is likely to define popular Texas history for the general reader for at least a generation to come." Austin American Statesman

"Harrigan is at his best when he concentrates on the state's abundance of big personalities, offering up a gallery of Texas scoundrels, psychopaths, and incompetents...[Harrigan] brings an appealing humility to the impossible task of cramming a raucous, vicious, glorious state into one big, wonderful book." Texas Observer

"A big wonderful book…[Big Wonderful Thing] is fun to read. Harrigan knows how to tell a story that keeps the reader looking forward to the next one." Abilene Reporter-News