Can't Get a Red Bird

by Dorothy Scarborough

An important proletarian novel set in the world of cotton-growing tenant farmers in Texas. From his earliest years, Johnny Carr had been aware of King Cotton's strangle hold over those he loved, and when, at the age of eleven, Fate made him "the man of the family," he entered into a battle with the enemy that was to occupy him for the whole of life.

There is a wistful quality in Johnny's early struggles, in his first success in settling his parents on a farm of their own. But in his beautiful love fora good woman, his devotion to a cause which was to change a whole state-full of ne'er-do-well farmers into a prosperous community, there is courage and inspiration. Here for the first time is told the fight of the Texas cotton-growers to secure for themselves their fair share of the fruits of their labor.

408 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Emily Dorothy Scarborough was an American writer who wrote about Texas, folk culture, cotton farming, ghost stories and women's life in the Southwest.

Scarborough was born in Mount Carmel, Texas. At the age of four she moved to Sweetwater, Texas for her mother's health, as her mother needed the drier climate. The family soon left Sweetwater in 1887, so that the Scarborough children could get a good education at Baylor College.

Even though Scarborough's writings are identified with Texas, she studied at University of Chicago and Oxford University and beginning in 1916 taught literature at Columbia University.

While receiving her PhD from Columbia, she wrote a dissertation, "The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)". Sylvia Ann Grider writes in a critical introduction [1] the dissertation "was so widely acclaimed by her professors and colleagues that it was published and it has become a basic reference work."

Dorothy Scarborough came in contact with many writers in New York, including Edna Ferber and Vachel Lindsay. She taught creative writing classes at Columbia. Among her creative writing students were Eric Walrond, and Carson McCullers, who took her first college writing class from Scarborough.[1]

Her most critically acclaimed book, The Wind (first published anonymously in 1925), was later made into a film of the same name starring Lillian Gish.