The Kings of Big Spring
God, Oil, and One Family's Search for the American Dream
by Bryan Mealer
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Pub Date Feb 06 2018 | Archive Date Jan 02 2018
Description
"Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy."
— Bryan Burrough, New York Times bestselling author of THE BIG RICH and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE
"Bryan Mealer has given us a brilliant, and brilliantly entertaining, portrayal of family, and a bursting-at-the-seams chunk of America in the bargain.”
— Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
A saga of family, fortune, faith in Texas, where blood is bond and oil is king…
In 1892, Bryan Mealer’s great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. But his luck soon runs out. Beset by drought, the family loses their farm just as the dead pastures around them give way to one of the biggest oil booms in American history. They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast fortunes are being made from its own reserves of oil. For the next two generations, the Mealers live on the margins of poverty, laboring in the cotton fields and on the drilling rigs that sprout along the flatland, weathering dust and wind, booms and busts, and tragedies that scatter them like tumbleweed. After embracing Pentecostalism during the Great Depression, they rely heavily on their faith to steel them against hardship and despair. But for young Bobby Mealer, the author’s father, religion is only an agent for rebellion.
In the winter of 1981, when the author is seven years old, Bobby receives a call from an old friend with a simple question, “How'd you like to be a millionaire?”
Twenty-six, and with a wife and three kids, Bobby had left his hometown to seek a life removed from the blowing dust and oil fields, and to find spiritual peace. But now Big Spring’s streets are flooded again with roughnecks, money, and sin. Boom chasers pour in from the busted factory towns in the north. Drilling rigs rise like timber along the pastures, and poor men become millionaires overnight.
Grady Cunningham, Bobby's friend, is one of the newly-minted kings of Big Spring. Loud and flamboyant, with a penchant for floor-length fur coats, Grady pulls Bobby and his young wife into his glamorous orbit. While drilling wells for Grady's oil company, they fly around on private jets and embrace the honky-tonk high life of Texas oilmen. But beneath the Rolexes and Rolls Royce cars is a reality as dark as the crude itself. As Bobby soon discovers, his return to Big Spring is a backslider’s journey into a spiritual wilderness, and one that could cost him his life.
A masterwork of memoir and narrative history, The Kings of Big Spring is an indelible portrait of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself. And in telling the story of four generations of his family, Mealer also tells the story of America came to be.
Advance Praise
"The Kings of Big Spring tears like a flaming
roller-coaster through four generations of a Texas family that's lived it all,
from hardscrabble farms and tarpaper shacks to the crazy-making highs of oil
booms and big money, with gobs of love, lust, heartache, and Jesus along the way.
Bryan Mealer has given us a brilliant, and brilliantly entertaining, portrayal
of family, and a bursting-at-the-seams chunk of America in the bargain."
— Ben Fountain, New
York Times bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
"Mealer has pulled off something downright remarkable here.
On one level, he has penned a sweeping multigenerational family chronicle
that can be read as a history of Texas and, by natural extension, of the
American experience. But it's more than even that. In the small twists of
fate and nature that buffet the extended Lewis-Mealer clan are reminders of the
profound capriciousness of life, of how something as simple as a rain that
doesn't come - or a weevil that does - can alter a family's fortunes forever.
Masterful and deeply thought-provoking."
—Scott Anderson, author of the New York Times bestselling Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit,
Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
"THE KINGS OF BIG SPRING is the kind of epic tale we rarely see, the
sprawling, multi-generation story of a single, hardscrabble working-class
family, scrapping and clawing its way through dust storms, droughts and
oilfields in its quest for a sliver of the American Dream. At a time when the
national spotlight is rediscovering the plight of Middle American families,
this book will never be more relevant. Think of it as a Texas version of
``Hillbilly Elegy.’'
— Bryan Burrough, author of ``Public
Enemies’’ and ``Barbarians at the Gate''
"The Kings of
Big Spring is the manual laborers' view of 20th century Texas
economic
history -- a tour de force unlike any Texana I've read and a must for the
collector. Mealer reminds me of Carl Sandburg, Howard Zinn
and John Steinbeck all rolled into one.
— Erwin McGee Balcones Books (Austin, TX)
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781250058911 |
| PRICE | $27.99 (USD) |
