Garland Roark - Life

Life

In his own words: "I was born in Groesbeck, Texas. My father died when I was four and my mother began to teach school. Before I was five I had learned to read and write and discovered a talent for drawing which developed over the years until my ambition was to first become a cartoonist, then an illustrator. I delivered the Dallas Journal every morning, taking as pay watercolor lessons, and during the great hurricane of 1915 when I was ten, I was considered quite a hero for having delivered the paper, even though flying tin roofs sailed about me. My education was cut short after a year of college when I went to work to help support my mother and young sister. I was a soda-fountain boy, a sign painter, a door-to-door magazine salesman; I worked in the oil fields and aboard cargo vessels plying the Mexican Gulf and Caribbean Sea, where I met many odd but wonderful characters who appear in my works of sea fiction.

"Later I got a job as a window display artist and fulfilled my desire for education by studying nights. I became an avid reader of every subject and increased my powers of observation of people and life. I began writing during the 1940s and after several rejections my book, Wake of the Red Witch, became a Literary Guild selection in 1946."

• Garland Roark later lived and worked in Nacogdoches, Texas. On September 14, 1939, he married the former Leola Elisabeth Burke. He dedicated to her two of his novels and esteemed her as "the world’s greatest literary critic.” Together, Roark and Leola had two daughters: Sharon and Wanda, respectively.

• Favorite hobby: watercoloring.

• Spent one year at West Texas State Teachers College (West Texas A&M University).

• In 1954, Texas Governor Allan Shivers appointed Roark an Honorary Admiral in the Texas Navy.

• He also contributed numerous historical articles to the Houston Chronicle.

• Catalogued as the Garland Roark Collection, Roark's lifework has been deposited in the archives of Stephen F. Austin State University's Ralph W. Steen Library. (To view a list of its contents, access the first External Link below.)