The new edition, released this past fall during Banned Books Week, includes a foreword by Bennett. She found an ally in her mother-in-law, Dominique Raccah, the publisher of Sourcebooks, who agreed to reissue My First Thirty Years. She eventually tracked down a 1989 copy, but the fact that it was so hard to find, that “a voice that captures this complexity and fierceness was banned, was silenced-I just couldn’t get over it.” The small taste of My First Thirty Years she encountered (“It just makes your hair stand on end,” she says) left her searching for more.

Nina Bennett, AB’07, a Dallas-based independent scholar, ran into this problem after reading Beasley’s excerpt in Lone Star Literature. The 1925 first edition sells for hundreds of dollars, and only 500 copies of the 1989 reissue were published. Born into poverty, she made a new life for herself through education-and risked everything she’d worked for to tell the truth about her experiences in print.įor all its merit, My First Thirty Years was, until very recently, a difficult book to find. Norton, 2003).īeasley stood out for the strength of her writing and for her personal tenacity. Larry McMurtry, the author of another Texas classic, Lonesome Dove (Simon and Schuster, 1985), spearheaded a 1989 limited-edition reissue of My First Thirty Years literary critic Don Graham excerpted the memoir’s first several pages in Lone Star Literature: A Texas Anthology (W. Among Texas writers in the know, her name circulated long after she disappeared from the public eye. Still, the few copies that survived were enough to keep Beasley’s (AM 1918) literary legacy alive. The book was banned in Britain, destroyed by US Customs, and hunted down by the Texas Rangers. Mencken called it “sharp and tremendously effective”-but it also attracted powerful enemies. Beasley’s memoir of her often-abusive Texas childhood earned praise from the era’s literati-H.

She left behind only one book, My First Thirty Years (Contact Editions, 1925). In 1928 a young writer named Gertrude Beasley sailed from London to New York and was never heard from again.

Gertrude beasley my first thirty years