Grover Lewis Papers

Grover Virgil Lewis, Jr. was born November 8, 1934, in San Antonio, Texas. Tragedy struck the Lewis family when Grover was eight years old during an encounter between Grover’s mother and his estranged father that led to a double-homicide with each parent allegedly murdering the other by gunshot. Lewis was soon removed to Fort Worth, Texas, where he lived with the blight of, in his own words, a “haunted” and “painful” existence while in the abusive household of his maternal aunt and her husband. After five years, he fled to live with his uncle, “Spook” Bailey, in the Dallas suburb of Oak Cliff.

At Oak Cliff, Lewis attended W.H. Adamson High School and worked at the Texas Theater, a site made infamous some years later as the location where Lee Harvey Oswald was taken into custody. He graduated from Adamson in 1953 and moved to Denton to attend North Texas State College where he majored in English and Drama. It was around this time that Lewis married and fathered a son and a daughter with his first wife, Peggy. At North Texas he also found a “kindred spirit” in future Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry. Together Lewis and McMurtry —“each being the only aspiring writer the other knew”— found their way around the back roads and byways of Texas. And Lewis, like McMurtry, began his career as a writer while attending North Texas. He and McMurtry both won various student writing awards for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Avesta, the school’s literary magazine; and Lewis’s creative work was soon published in other literary magazines and journals such as Carolina Quarterly, New Mexico Quarterly, and The Nation. Samuel French Inc. published his play Wait for Morning, Child, after winning the company’s national collegiate writing contest. Also while at North Texas, Lewis and McMurtry and a third North Texas student, John Lewis (no relation to Grover) self-published two issues of The Coexistence Review, a literary magazine full of original poetry, short fiction, and essays that became notoriously controversial on campus. Knowing that after graduation they were both headed in different directions —both moving away from Denton— Lewis and McMurtry intended the magazine as a token of gratitude devoted to several inspiring professors at North Texas. The school’s administration, however, was not as enthusiastic about the project as the 200-plus students who eagerly bought-out the magazine. According to Lewis’s book proposal for his unfinished memoir Goodbye If You Call That Gone, “The administration sent out growls of disapproval via channels. Somebody had to explain the ‘political error’ of the red lone-star cover to us. It began to be whispered around that there would be a loyalty investigation of some sort…whether conducted by the school or the state legislature, nobody would say.”

The Coexistence Review was interpreted as a thinly-veiled attempt to broadcast communist propaganda; and Lewis and McMurtry were thus prohibited from publishing in the school’s accepted literary magazine, Avesta (although the two had been named winners of the semester’s literary awards). But the threatened investigations never materialized, and Lewis and McMurtry both graduated on schedule from North Texas State College in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in English. Lewis left Denton but remained in Texas, contributing book and music reviews to several of the state’s metropolitan newspapers such as the Dallas Times Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

In 1960, Lewis was named a National Defense Act fellow and moved to Lubbock to pursue a Ph.D. at Texas Technical College (now Texas Tech University). While a graduate student at Tech, he again wrote for the school newspaper and edited Tech’s literary magazine, The Harbinger. Lewis also worked as a graduate teaching assistant, and his students included Ponty Bone and Jimmie Dale Gilmore — both of whom became acclaimed Texas musicians.

While in Lubbock, Lewis found himself frustrated by the conservative culture, lifestyle, and politics of the South Plains. Around 1960, he made plans to leave and set out to find and write about blues musician Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lewis traveled to Houston’s Third Ward and spent a week with Hopkins writing what eventually became a 5-part series published years later in The Village Voice (1968) and winner of a Sigma Delta Chi writing award.

It was during this time, circa 1963, that Lewis discovered his passionate interest in film journalism. Accepting an invitation from McMurtry, Lewis spent a week on the film set of Hud in Amarillo, a motion picture adaptation of McMurtry’s novel Horseman, Pass By. Lewis’s unrealized notes from his experience in Amarillo became the blueprint from which he would work seven years later, with his famous Rolling Stone article about the filming of The Last Picture Show.

After returning from Houston to his graduate studies at Lubbock, Lewis met fierce resistance to his scathing review in the school paper of a Christian, anti-communist tract written by Billy James Hargis. He was subsequently dismissed from his duties as columnist for the school paper, abandoned by his professors, and received death threats by phone and mail. Lewis’s appeals for help — to, among others, the Students for a Democratic Society - fell on deaf ears. Lewis, in turn, not only dropped out of graduate school, but divorced his wife and signed away parental rights to his two children.

Out of school and without his doctorate, Lewis returned to the copy desk of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where he slipped into the life of a hard-drinking newsman. During his three-year tenure at the Star-Telegram, he contributed frequent reviews to the book page and began the first pop music column for a daily newspaper in the state of Texas. In 1966, Lewis moved to Houston as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, but quit two years later to write copy for a Houston advertising and public relations firm. A year later, in 1969, Lewis moved to San Francisco, California, to work as a West Coast correspondent for The Village Voice.

Although his term at the Voice was brief (1969-1970), Lewis was able to utilize his unique position at the epicenter of youth-culture activity by covering such milestones as the Native American takeover of Alcatraz Island and the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway. It was Lewis’s coverage of the Altamont murder that caught the eye of Jann Wenner, founder, editor-in-chief, and publisher of one of the nation’s newest and most unpredictable magazines, Rolling Stone.

From 1970 to 1973, Lewis worked as Associate Editor of Rolling Stone magazine, in charge of features on film and books. Rolling Stone’s independent spirit proved auspicious for Lewis. He was allowed to self-assign stories and follow his own initiative; and in doing so, produced electrifying pieces of New Journalism, notably his “Splendor in the Short Grass” — a piece The New York Times later called “extraordinary” — which revolved around the wealth of in-house drama running throughout the big-budget motion picture production of director Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, a film adaptation of yet another Larry McMurtry novel. Due to the praise and popularity of that reportage, Lewis was able to continue producing on-location features for Rolling Stone, interviewing such eminent talents as Robert Mitchum, Sam Peckinpah, Robert Redford, and Paul Newman.

Although Straight Arrow Press, the publishing arm of Rolling Stone, published two books featuring Lewis’s work—I’ll Be There In the Morning, If I Live (poetry) and Academy All The Way (collected Rolling Stone coverage)—his relationship with Jann Wenner soured, in large part due to a baulked agreement between Wenner and Lewis over a book Lewis was contracted to write with friend Sherry Kafka about Texas politician John Connally. Lewis describes Wenner — dubbing him “Citizen Wenner” — as a capricious and manipulating editor, a “bottom-feeder” with a personality “exacerbated by cocaine.” Lewis sued Wenner over the Connally deal for breach of contract and was awarded $10,000 in an arbitration proceeding.

After marrying Rolling Stone employee Raona Ence Seavey in 1973, Lewis quit the magazine and moved with Rae to her home state of Utah where he found work despite Wenner’s attempt to blacklist him professionally. Lewis worked briefly as a freelance writer for Playboy and Oui magazines before moving back to California—Los Angeles, this time—in late 1976 to write for New West (later named California), a nascent publication at the time.

At New West, Lewis continued where he left off at Rolling Stone, writing pieces about Bette Midler, Elisha Cook, Jr. (from The Maltese Falcon), and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Lewis was walking with Flynt outside the county courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia, when the publisher was shot in an assassination attempt. The article, “The Shooting of Larry Flynt: An Eyewitness Account by Grover Lewis,” was published as a cover feature for the March 27, 1978, issue of New West. In addition to celebrity profiles, Lewis wrote opinion-driven pieces for New West, such as his “Buried Alive in Hype: My Years Among The Reality Vultures,” which was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 1979.

During the 1980s, as freelance magazine work became more elusive, Lewis turned to newsprint, contributing stories and book reviews for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The St. Petersburg Times. It was also during this time that Lewis worked as book editor of Movieline magazine and began copious research for his unrealized novel, The Code of the West, based on the Western cinema-heroes of Old Hollywood.

In 1992, Lewis began to confront the troubling memories of his childhood with his Texas Monthly article “Farewell to Cracker Eden,” nominated for a PEN West award for journalism in 1993. On the strength and poignancy of that well-received article, he was awarded a contract with HarperCollins to write a memoir under the editorial guidance of Judith Regan. Unfortunately, the memoir—which was to be titled Goodbye If You Call That Gone—remained unfinished due to Lewis’s untimely death from lung cancer on April 16, 1995. His widow, Rae Lewis, began donating his literary archives to the Wittliff Collections in 2001. In 2005, University of Texas Press published Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader, a collection of Lewis’s journalism and poetry spanning his nearly forty-year career. The collection preserves Lewis’s work—and reputation—as one of New Journalism’s founding fathers and most fearless mavericks. In his New York Times book review of Splendor, Roy Blount, Jr., calls Lewis’s work “Impressive” and “worth preserving.” “Lips were loose in those days,” as Blount recalls, “and Lewis took every advantage.” Information used in this biographical note was extracted from the following sources: Lewis’s proposal of his non-fiction memoir, Goodbye If You Call That Gone, R. K. Scott’s “Grover Lewis: The Uncommon Insight and Grace of an Ordinary Man,” and Jan Reid and W.K. Stratton’s essay, “Star-Crossed: A biographical sketch of Grover Lewis,” from Splendor In The Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader.