Critical Reception
Steven L. Davis, assistant curator of the Southwestern Writers Collection and author of Texas Literary Outlaws, a group biography of Shrake, Jenkins, Cartwright, Brammer, King and Gent, said Blessed McGill, Strange Peaches and But Not for Love are ranked by literary scholars as among the best ever written about Texas." George Plimpton called Blessed McGill “n absolutely first-rate account of the rambunctious life and times of the Reconstruction years in Texas—an enthralling era of derring-do which finds its perfect chronicler in Mr. Shrake.” United Press International’s review of Strange Peaches stated that it was “not only one of the best-written American novels since World War II, it entertains…a great book, not just for critics, but for readers.” Screenwriter and photographer Bill Wittliff said that Shrake “was one of those who took the raw material of our history and was making real literature of it. He was one of the greats with Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. We were fortunate indeed to have his voice." McMurtry himself said in 1981 that "Shrake has always been an intriguing talent, far superior to his drinking buddies.” University of Texas professor Don Graham, a leading critic of Texas literature, has said that whenever anyone asks him what Dallas was like about the time of the Kennedy assassination, he sends them to Strange Peaches.
In 2008, the University of Texas Press published Land of the Permanent Wave, An Edwin "Bud" Shrake Reader, an anthology that takes its title from a May 1970 Harper's Magazine story about destruction of the Big Thicket by timber interests. Rejected by Sports Illustrated, where Shrake was still a staff writer and an East Texas lumber company was a stockholder, the story was picked up by Harper's editor Willie Morris, who called the “Land of the Permanent Wave” 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 personal papers and literary archive, dating to 1936, are stored at the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos; a portion of the archive previously was held by the Austin History Center At a Southwestern Writers Collection event in 2008, Shrake urged friends to heed Johnny Mercer's lyrics: "You've got to accentuate the positive. Eliminate the negative. Latch on the affirmative. Don't mess with Mister In-Between." Despite his advanced lung cancer, Shrake made an appearance on April 8, 2009 at a special screening of Songwriter in Austin. He was roughly 100 pages into a new novel when he died. His 2006 play “The Friend of Carlos Monzon,” based on the time he was briefly held in an Argentine prison during the 1970s while on assignment for Sports Illustrated, is still scheduled to run at Austin’s Long Center in June.
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