Literature
The King family and the ranch are part of the myth and mystique of Texas, and they have been featured in numerous stories and novelizations. For example, the Kings of Texas traces the history of the ranch through "decades of conflict arising from the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and countless skirmishes between Texas Rangers and border bandits".
Edna Ferber's novel Giant of the ranches of Texas was turned into a film: Giant. The theme song of the film is a staple for high school bands in Texas. Many of the events of the King Ranch, such as the discovery of oil on the property, are also in the film. Working-class millionaires can still be found in the oil towns of Texas, as well.
In the James Michener novel Centennial, the Venneford Ranch was said to be patterned after the King Ranch.
The historical fiction novel Lords of the Land by Matt Braun is based on the King Ranch and its founder, although names and some circumstance have been altered.
Read more about this topic: King Ranch
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)