Wilson Mathis Hudson Papers

Wilson Mathis Hudson was born in Flatonia Texas on December 26, 1907. He received his B.A. in 1929 and M.A. in 1930 from the University of Texas at Austin. Hudson was an instructor of English at Rice University until 1937, when he briefly left teaching to work as a traveling representative for the publishing house of G & C. Merriam Co. In 1939, Hudson began his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. World War II intervened and he left to serve in the United States Army Air Force from 1942 to 1946. He ultimately received his Ph.D. in English in 1947. He then joined the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin and taught there until retiring as professor emeritus in 1974. At the University of Texas, Hudson was friend and colleague to the folklorist J. Frank Dobie and the historian Walter Prescott Webb. In 1950, Hudson began teaching the popular English Department course, Life and Literature of the Southwest, which was initiated by Dobie in 1930. While teaching Southwestern literature, Hudson became interested in the cowboy writer Andy Adams, whose fiction had been rediscovered and championed by both Webb and Dobie as an accurate depiction of cowboy life. In 1956, Hudson edited Why the Chisholm Trail Forks and other Tales of the Cattle Country, a collection of Adam's campfire tales extracted from his fiction. Aided by Dobie's previous research papers, he wrote Adams' biography in 1964. Comparative literature and folklore were Hudson's chief areas of scholarly interest. He was named an associate editor to the Texas Folklore Society in 1951 and was secretary-editor from 1951 to 1972. He edited or co-edited approximately eighteen books under the auspices of the Folklore Society. Hudson was married to Mildred Ruckman from 1932 until her death in 1949. He married the professor of English and Browning scholar Gertrude Reese in 1951.