Alan Shrake Popular Books

Alan Shrake Biography & Facts

Edwin A. "Bud" Shrake, Jr. (September 6, 1931 – May 8, 2009) was an American journalist, sportswriter, novelist, biographer and screenwriter. He co-wrote a series of golfing advice books with golf coach Harvey Penick, including Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, a golf guide that became the best-selling sports book in publishing history. Called a “lion of Texas letters” by the Austin American-Statesman, Shrake was a member of the Texas Film Hall of Fame, and received the Lon Tinkle lifetime achievement award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas Book Festival Bookend Award. Early life Shrake was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and attended Paschal High School where, along with Dan Jenkins, he wrote for the school newspaper the Paschal Pantherette. He served in the Army and attended the University of Texas at Austin and Texas Christian University. In 1951, Shrake joined Jenkins at the Fort Worth Press while he completed his degree in English and philosophy at TCU. Shrake started on the police beat for the underdog Press while Gary Cartwright covered the same beat for the mainstream Fort Worth Star-Telegram. According to Cartwright, he and Shrake usually could be found hanging out at a bar across the street from the police station; a copy boy monitoring police calls would alert them to stories. Looking back at his job interview at the Press, Shrake would write “it was a rackety, dirty city paper, with the teletypes clacking and a sense of urgency everywhere. A copy editor was eating tuna fish out of a can, and the bowling writer was drinking bourbon, and I thought, 'This is the world I want to be in.' " At the Press, he also worked under legendary sports editor Blackie Sherrod who said about Shrake, “he immediately showed talent and went on to remarkable success and acclaim far beyond the pressbox." In 1958, Shrake moved to the Dallas Times Herald as a sportswriter, followed by a move in 1961 to the Dallas Morning News in order to write a daily sports column. Shrake wrote about the Comanche’s final battle against the United States Army in his first novel, Blood Reckoning (1962). But Not For Love, published in 1964, looked at the post-war generation. Sports Illustrated In 1964, Shrake moved to New York City, following Jenkins, to join the staff of Sports Illustrated, where editor André Laguerre considered him a "literary" sportswriter. Accordingly, Laguerre often allowed Shrake to write "bonus pieces"—long feature stories sometimes barely related to sports. Among the notable feature articles Shrake wrote for Sports Illustrated are “The Once Forbidding Land” (1965), a profile of life in the Texas Hill Country, and “The Tarahumaras: A Lonely Tribe of Long-Distance Runners” (1967), which he wrote after spending several weeks with the Tarahumaras in Northern Mexico. Return to Texas Shrake returned to Texas in 1968 and continued his association with Sports Illustrated until 1979 while also writing novels and screenplays. His 1968 book Blessed McGill, set during Reconstruction, is often cited as a classic of Texas fiction, as is his 1972 novel Strange Peaches. Strange Peaches is set in Dallas just before and after the Kennedy assassination. The novel's lead character is a TV Western star who quits his show and returns to Dallas to make a documentary. The book is based in part on Shrake's own life story: in November 1963, he was dating Jada, the star dancer at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. Strange Peaches includes Ruby as a supporting character, and borrows the real-life moment when Shrake, standing with his camera at Main and Houston, locked eyes with Kennedy. In 1969, Shrake wrote what is perhaps his best-known article, "Land of the Permanent Wave", about a trip to the Big Thicket in East Texas, where he encounters environmental destruction, as well as xenophobia, bigotry and a sense of living in the past, exemplified by the permanent wave hairstyle still popular among women there. He intended the article for publication in Sports Illustrated, but it was rejected, possibly because an East Texas lumber company was a stockholder. It was instead published in the February 1970 issue of Harper's Magazine. Harper's editor Willie Morris later called it one of the two best pieces Morris ever published during his tenure at the magazine. Morris wrote that Shrake's story "struck a chord in me that I have never quite forgotten, having to do with how clean, funny, and lambent prose caught the mood of that moment in the country and mirrored with great felicity what we were trying to do at Harper's. To me few finer magazine essays have ever been written." Shrake’s acidic look at his home state continued in Peter Arbiter (1973), a retelling of Petronius’ Satyricon that compares oil-boom Texas to Rome’s decadence. In 1976 Shrake and Jenkins published Limo, a satiric look at network television executives struggling to produce “Just Up The Street,” a reality show showing four families live for three hours in prime-time. Mad Dog Inc. During the 60s and 70s, Shrake, Jenkins, Cartwright (who would go on to write for Texas Monthly), Billy Lee Brammer (The Gay Place), Larry L. King ("The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"), Peter Gent (North Dallas Forty) and Texas journalist/professor Jay Milner were part of a “ragtag assemblage” of Texas writers known as Mad Dog Inc. Jenkins would describe Shrake as "an easy writer, a fast writer, a creative writer." "We were into smoking and drinking and hanging out, like most writers in the old days," Jenkins said. "I think journalism was a stopover for him. But he was awfully good at it." Cartwright would later say that "[w]e were fairly wild, untamed, uncontrolled boys.” Shrake and Cartwright eventually incorporated a company named Mad Dog Productions. According to Shrake’s archives, the company’s motto was “doing indefinable services to mankind" (, and its only documented service was giving $1,000 to the Armadillo World Headquarters in 1970 to help it financially. Mad Dogs Shrake and Cartwright often subjected unsuspecting strangers to the antics of the Flying Punzars, an alleged circus act; they occasionally were joined in these antics by musician Jerry Jeff Walker. Other Mad Dog antics included games of “naked bridge” at Dan and June Jenkins’ house in Fort Worth; a pissing contest between Shrake, Don Meredith, and George Plimpton held on the balcony of Shrake’s third-floor apartment in New York; and a multi-day bender in Austin that saw Cartwright drop out after about 27 hours, Hunter S. Thompson folding some 10–12 hours later, and Shrake and Walker being still on the town on the morning of the fourth day. Shrake’s Mad Dog adventures while on the Sports Illustrated staff include the time he hired Frank Sinatra to go to Europe to photograph a heavyweight boxing match — Sinatra received press credentials but missed his flight; the time he was saved from a mob by Mohammed Ali; the time a London soccer team elected him honorary captain after winning an i.... Discover the Alan Shrake popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Alan Shrake books.