Texas Originals

George Sessions Perry

May 5, 1910–ca. 1956

Author George Sessions Perry captured Texas cotton culture like no other writer. Born in 1910 in Rockdale, Texas, he spent much of his career rendering a fictional version of his beloved hometown.

In 1937, Perry sold his first story to the Saturday Evening Post, beginning a lifelong relationship with the magazine. Inspired by John Steinbeck and J. Frank Dobie, Perry published his first novel, titled Walls Rise Up, in 1939.

Perry’s most acclaimed work was 1941’s Hold Autumn in Your Hand, a vivid depiction of Depression-era cotton farming. The novel recounts a year in the life of a Milam County tenant farmer and reflects Perry’s appreciation for rural life, as well as his criticism of the exploitative conditions of sharecropping. A 1945 film adaptation was directed by Jean Renoir.

During World War II, Perry worked as a correspondent covering the Allied invasion of Sicily. He once told a friend that his wartime experiences "de-fictionized" him. Afterward, he focused more on nonfiction and journalism and found his writing in high demand by the country’s leading publications.

However, Perry struggled with arthritis and depression and ultimately died at the age of forty-six. His works remain, as one critic wrote, the best picture we have of the state’s pre-industrial cotton culture—"a world of subsistence farming and the yearlong ritual of planting and picking."

For More about George Sessions Perry

In 1964, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired George Sessions Perry’s papers, which include multiple drafts of handwritten manuscripts, many unpublished. Taken together with his books and articles, these archives provide a nuanced portrait of a leading Texas author.

In his book Texas: A World in Itself, Perry wrote that "Rockdale, my hometown, is Texas’ heart and a significant part of its soul." Though the town was initially ambivalent about Perry’s fictional portrayal of it (much like Salinas, California, was of John Steinbeck’s stories), Rockdale’s public library now gives Perry’s first editions and magazine articles pride of place in its collection, and a Texas historical marker commemorates Perry’s Rockdale connection just outside. 

Perry worked for a number of publications, including the New Yorker, Esquire, Life, and Country Gentleman, but he was always most closely associated with the iconic Saturday Evening Post. As with the Ransom Center, this places Perry in good company, as the Post long made some of America’s best writers and artists accessible to a wide audience, including such figures as Norman Rockwell, Edith Wharton, and Kurt Vonnegut. The publication’s brand continues today, and its website reflects the magazine’s legacy regarding these key American literary figures.

Cattle and oil have loomed large in public perceptions of Texas economic history, but the labor of cotton dominated the everyday lives of more Texans for a much longer period of time. Perry’s writing is a monument to what that work looked like and meant in the later days of cotton tenancy from the 1920s to the 1940s, but there are other places to learn this history in all of its fascinating detail. Burton, not too far from Perry’s Rockdale, houses the Texas Cotton Gin Museum with exhibits documenting Texas’s long relationship with King Cotton. Every April, the museum provides a living history demonstration of cotton processing during the Cotton Gin Festival.

Selected Bibliography

Alexander, Stanley. George Sessions Perry. Austin: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1967.

Christian, Garna L. George Sessions Perry: The Man and His Words. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2009.

Hairston, Maxine Cousins. George Sessions Perry: His Life and Works. Austin: Jenkins Publishing Company, 1973.

McMahan, Truman. "Remembering George Sessions Perry." Southwestern Historical Quarterly 95, no. 3 (Jan 1992): 369-376.

Perry, George Sessions. Hold Autumn in Your Hand. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975 [1941].

Perry, George Sessions. My Granny Van: The Running Battle of Rockdale, Texas. New York: Whittlesey House, 1949.

Perry, George Sessions. Texas: A World in Itself. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1975 [1942].

Perry, George Sessions. Walls Rise Up: A Novel. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1994 [1939].

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Undated portrait of George Sessions Perry, photographed by Lillian Kessel.

Cover of Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry, originally published in 1941