The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

In an article that will appear in Sunday's New York Times Review of Books, Mimi Schwartz, an executive editor at Texas Monthly writes:

It may be hard for outsiders to accept, but there is, in fact, a Texas canon. Opinions vary, but my list would include T. R. Fehrenbach’s “Lone Star,” John Bainbridge’s “Super Americans,” John Graves’s “Goodbye to a River,” Larry McMurtry's “Lonesome Dove” and his nonfiction classic “In a Narrow Grave,” certain Molly Ivins columns, the Texas portions of Willie Morris’s “North Toward Home,” Billy Lee Brammer’s “Gay Place,” ­Tommy Thompson’s vastly underrated “Blood and Money” and Edna Ferber’s “Giant.” Not all of these works are great literature, and not all of them were written by ­Texans, but they’re all required reading if you want to understand the Texas soul. It’s a complicated thing, a roiling psychic stew of narcissism, ambition, brilliance, humor, vengefulness, pettiness, fearlessness and, of course, a bottomless pit of need. (For what? Pretty much ­everything.)

This pargraph begins her review of a new book, “The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes,” by Bryan Burroughs that chronicles the lives of Houston's Roy Cullen, Fort Worth's Sid Richardson and Dallas' Clint Murchison and H.L. Hunt. “If Texas Oil had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would adorn it,” Burrough writes. “A good ol’ boy. A scold. A genius. A bigamist. Known in their heyday as the Big Four, they became the founders of the greatest Texas family fortunes, headstrong adventurers who rose from nowhere to take turns being acclaimed America’s wealthiest man.”

Schwartz says Burroughs' book makes for "lively reading," but, in the end, the author "bit off a little more than he could chew." At 466 pages, that does seem likely.