Historical fiction dealing with early day Texas is, however, distinctly maturing. As a dramatization of Jim Bowie and the bowie knife, _The Iron Mistress_, by Paul Wellman (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1951), is the best novel published so far dealing with a figure of the Texas revolution. In _Divine Average_ (Little, Brown, Boston, 1952), Elithe Hamilton Kirkland weaves from her seasoned knowledge of life and from "realities of those violent years in Texas history between 1838 and 1858" a story of human destiny. She reveals the essential nature of Range Templeton more distinctly, more mordantly, than history has revealed the essential nature of Sam Houston or any of his contemporaries. The wife and daughter of Range Templeton are the most plausible women in any historical novel of Texas that I have read. The created world here is more real than the actual. Among the early tale-tellers of the Southwest are Jeremiah Clemens, who wrote _Mustang Gray_, Mollie E. Moore Davis, of plantation tradition, Mayne Reid, who dared convey real information in his romances, Charles W. Webber, a naturalist, and T. B. Thorpe, creator of "The Big Bear of Arkansas." Fiction that appeared before World War I can hardly be called modern. No fiction is likely to appear, however, that will do better by certain types of western character and certain stages of development in western society than that produced by Bret Harte, with his gamblers; stage drivers, and mining camps; O. Henry with his "Heart of the West" types; Alfred Henry Lewis with his "Wolfville" anecdotes and characters; Owen Wister, whose _Virginian_ remains the classic of cowboy novels without cows; and Andy Adams, whose _Log of a Cowboy_ will be read as long as people want a narrative of cowboys sweating with herds. The authors listed below are in alphabetical order. Those who seem to me to have a chance to survive are not exactly in that order. FRANK APPLEGATE (died 1932) wrote only two books, _Native Tales of New Mexico_ and _Indian Stories from the Pueblos_, but as a delighted and delightful teller of folk tales his place is secure. MARY AUSTIN seems to be settling down as primarily an expositor. Her novels are no longer read, but the simple tales in _One-Smoke Stories_ (her last book, 1934) and in some nonfiction collections, notably _Lost Borders_ and _The Flock_, do not recede with time. While the Southwest can hardly claim Willa Cather, of Nebraska, her _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ (1927), which is made out of New Mexican life, is not only the best-known novel concerned with the Southwest but one of the finest of America. Despite the fact that it is not on the literary map, Will Levington Comfort's _Apache_ (1931) remains for me the most moving and incisive piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found.