The Best I Recall: A Memoir

Gary Cartwright is one of Texas’s legendary writers. In a career spanning nearly six decades, he has been a newspaper reporter, Senior Editor of Texas Monthly, and author of several acclaimed books, including Blood Will Tell, Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, and Dirty Dealing. Cartwright was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for reporting excellence, and he has won several awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, including its most prestigious-the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement. His personal life has been as colorful and occasionally outrageous as any story he reported, and in this vivid, often hilarious, and sometimes deeply moving memoir, Cartwright tells the story of his writing career, tangled like a runaway vine with great friendships, love affairs, four marriages, four or five great dogs . . . looking always to explain, at least to himself, how the pattern probably makes a kind of perverted sense. Cartwright’s career began at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Fort Worth Press, among kindred spirits and fellow pranksters Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Dan Jenkins. He describes how the three rookie writers followed their mentor Blackie Sherrod to the Dallas Times Herald and the Dallas Morning News, becoming the “best staff of sportswriters anywhere, ever” and creating a new kind of sportswriting that “swept the country and became standard.” Cartwright recalls his twenty-five years at Texas Monthly, where he covered everything from true crime to notable Texans to Texas’s cultural oddities. Along the way, he tells lively stories about “rebelling against sobriety” in many forms, with friends and co-conspirators that included Willie Nelson, Ann Richards, Dennis Hopper, Willie Morris, Don Meredith, Jack Ruby, and countless others. A remarkable portrait of the writing life and Austin’s counterculture, The Best I Recall may skirt the line between fact and fiction, but it always tells the truth.

Table of Contents:
Preface Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Name Index

About the Author :
Gary Cartwright has had a distinguished career as a newspaper reporter and freelance writer, contributing stories to such national publications as Harper’s, Life, Saturday Review, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. His writing credits also include the books HeartWiseGuy and Galveston: A History of the Island, as well as the screenplays J. W. Coop and Another Pair of Aces, coauthored with Bud Shrake. Cartwright has held a Dobie-Paisano fellowship and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Stanley Walker Award for Journalism and the Press Club of Dallas Katie Award for Best Magazine News Story.