Rushing as depicted on the cover of her biography by Lou Halsell Rodenberger

Jane Gilmore Rushing (November 15, 1925 – July 4, 1997) was a Texan novelist and journalist, who used to be a staff writer for the Abilene Reporter-News in Abilene, Texas. Her works are the subject of Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer and Her Work, a book by Lou Halsell Rodenberger, former professor of English at McMurry University in Abilene.

Biography

Rushing grew up in Pyron, a West Texas farming community now recognizable only by a cemetery and railroad sign. From childhood, she wanted to be a writer. In seven novels published between 1963 and 1984, she built her stories around themes that few West Texas writers had dared to tackle. Most of her work centers on cotton farms and early ranches in a land she calls the “too-late frontier”. Her plots explore such sensitive topics as an affair between a mulatto girl and a West Texas cowboy and the painful recognition in an early-nineteenth-century community that one of their own is capable of child and wife abuse. Lou Halsell Rodenberger explores Rushing’s life and discusses in depth her novels and memoir. She finds that although Rushing considered herself a regional writer, her fiction transcends region in illuminating what has motivated and sustained the western frontier’s settlers and their descendants. In addition to her novels, Rushing co-authored with Kline A. Nall a history of Texas Tech University. Her final book, Starting from Pyron, explores the history and people of the community she grew up in and that inspired her writing.

Rushing, who had lived in Lubbock for most of her career, died of cancer in 1997, at the age of seventy-one. She was survived by her husband Jay (since deceased) and her son, James Arthur, Jr., a German Language professor at Rutgers University.

Books

  • Walnut Grove. Doubleday, New York (1964). OCLC 1379605
  • Against the Moon. Doubleday, Garden City, New York (1968). LCCN 68014166 (Expanded from Rushing's original story published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, 37: 3 (Summer, 1961), 378-383.)
  • Geh Schlafen, Mein Herz, es ist Zeit: Familienroman aus Texas. Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg (1969). ASIN B0026O9O50
  • Tamzen. Doubleday, Garden City, New York (1972). ISBN 0385012004
  • Mary Dove: A Love Story. Doubleday, Garden City, New York (1974). ISBN 0385083025, ISBN 0896725030, ISBN 9780896725034
  • Evolution of a University: Texas Tech's First Fifty Years. With Kline A. Nall. Madrona Press, Austin, Texas (1975). ISBN 0890520178, ISBN 9780890520178
  • The Raincrow. Doubleday, Garden City, New York (1977). ISBN 0385130597
  • Covenant of Grace: A Novel of Anne Hutchinson. Doubleday, Garden City, New York (1982). ISBN 038517702X
  • Winds of Blame. Doubleday, Garden City, New York (1983). ISBN 0385177011
  • Starting from Pyron. With photographs by Billie Roche Barnard; introduction by A.C. Greene. Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock, Texas (1992). ISBN 089672283X, ISBN 9780896722835

Awards and honors

  • Inducted into the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters, 1969.

References

    Sources

    • Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer and Her Work. By Lou Halsell Rodenberger, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas (2006). ISBN 9780896725935
    • Place in the Novels of Jane Gilmore Rushing. by Ariel Durham Peugh, Texas Christian University, Department of English Dissertation (PhD), Fort Worth, Texas (1998).
    • Jane Giilmore Rushing, By Cheryl Key and Peggy Scaggs, pages 160-165 in Texas Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own. Edited by Sylvian Ann Grider and Lou Halsell Rodenberger, Texas A&M University Press, College Station, Texas (1997). ISBN 0890967652, ISBN 9780890967652
    • Jane Gilmore Rushing : social historian of West Texas. By Cheryl Lancaster, Angelo State University, Department of English Thesis (M.A.), San Angelo, Texas (1988). OCLC 21396406
    • Gentle Giants: Women Writers in Texas. By Iva Nell Elder, Eakin Press, Austin, Texas, (1983). ISBN 0890153981, ISBN 9780890153987
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