Walls Rise Up

by George Sessions Perry

In this classic Depression-era Texas novel, three wayfaring comrades ask for no pity as they travel the country looking for signs from the "Higher Powers" - and for whiskey and women. As Eddie, the narrator, muses "the Higher Powers had meant us to live like wild free studhorses roaming the face of the earth and gladdening whatever hearts we run across." Finding their way to a camp under a Brazos River bridge, Eddie, Mike and Jimmy survive on windfalls they find, con, or take outright. Their ribald adventures sparkle with humorous philosophy and wry social satire. One can "scarcely find a book that is more politically incorrect than Walls Rise Up, " writes Judyth Rigler in the foreword, "yet the reader . . . finds it easy to laugh at descriptions of shiftless hoboes, alcoholics, loose women, dimwitted giants, liars, thieves and the like." First published in 1939 by Doubleday Doran, this reprint includes a little known, previously unpublished chapter that Perry had intended for a future edition.

154 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Virtually unknown today, Perry was one of Texas’ most celebrated authors in the 1940s and 50s.

Born in Rockdale in 1910, Perry attended several colleges, but never graduated. Instead, he moved back to his hometown and pushed through the Great Depression with a small inheritance and a determination to write about the rural and small-town life around him. He married the love of his life, Claire Hodges, on the 20th of February 1933 in her hometown of Beaumont, Texas. They would remain devoted to each other until his death, and had no children.

Publication in the Saturday Evening Post came in 1937, then a book deal. In 1941 came his masterwork, “Hold Autumn in Your Hand” — one of America’s most celebrated agrarian novels oft compared to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It won the Texas Institute of Letters award that year, became the first Texas book to win the National Book Award the next, and was made into a movie called The Southerner by famed French director Jean Renoir. It was to be his only novel.

Perry served as a war correspondent during World War II and so traumatized by the horrors he witnessed that he said it “defictionized” him for life. His subsequent work, no longer light-hearted, concentrated on nonfiction, including “My Granny Van” — about the maternal grandmother who raised him when he was orphaned at the age of 12 — and a history of Texas A&M University. Perry became a celebrated and well-paid magazine writer by the late 1940s.

Wracked by depression, hallucinations, acute arthritis and a drinking problem, in winter 1956 he walked out of his Connecticut home and into a nearby river; his body was found months later.

Reviews

[Deena Santori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, quirky little book

[Mark Tadder · Rating 4 out of 5]

So matter-of-factly funny that I wish the book was longer. The library service of Texas that recorded it had a perfect voice, talent, narrate it perfect made it even better