Name Jane Rushing Role Novelist | Education Texas Tech University | |
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Died July 4, 1997, Lubbock, Texas, United States Books Mary Dove, Starting from Pyron, Against the Moon, Walnut Grove, Evolution of a university | ||
Jane Gilmore Rushing (November 15, 1925 – July 4, 1997) was a Texan novelist and journalist, who used to be a staff writer for the Abilene Reporter-News in Abilene, Texas. Her works are the subject of Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer and Her Work, a book by Lou Halsell Rodenberger, former professor of English at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas. Rushing grew up in Pyron, a West Texas farming community now recognizable only by a cemetery and railroad sign. From childhood, she wanted to be a writer. In seven novels published between 1963 and 1984, she built her stories around themes that few West Texas writers had dared to tackle. Most of her work centers on cotton farms and early ranches in a land she calls the “too-late frontier”. Her plots explore such sensitive topics as an affair between a mulatto girl and a West Texas cowboy and the painful recognition in an early-nineteenth-century community that one of their own is capable of child and wife abuse. Lou Halsell Rodenberger explores Rushing’s life and discusses in depth her novels and memoir. She finds that although Rushing considered herself a regional writer, her fiction transcends region in illuminating what has motivated and sustained the western frontier’s settlers and their descendants. In addition to her novels, Rushing co-authored with Kline A. Nall a history of Texas Tech University. Her final book, Starting from Pyron, explores the history and people of the community she grew up in and that inspired her writing.
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Rushing, who had lived in Lubbock for most of her career, died of cancer in 1997, at the age of seventy-one. She was survived by her husband Jay (since deceased) and her son, James Arthur, Jr., a German Language professor at Rutgers University.