Jane Gilmore Rushing


Jane Gilmore Rushing was a Texan novelist and journalist, who was a staff writer for the Abilene Reporter-News in Abilene, Texas. Her works are the subject of Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer and Her Work, a book by Lou Halsell Rodenberger, former professor of English at McMurry University in Abilene.

Biography

Rushing grew up in Pyron, a West Texas farming community now identifiable only by a cemetery and a railroad sign. She had aspired to be a writer since childhood. In her seven novels published between 1963 and 1984, she explored themes that few West Texas writers had previously dared to address. Most of her work centers on cotton farms and early ranches in a land she calls the “too-late frontier”. Her plots explore such sensitive topics as an affair between a mulatto girl and a West Texas cowboy and the painful recognition in an early-nineteenth-century community that one of their own is capable of child and wife abuse.
Lou Halsell Rodenberger explores Rushing’s life and discusses in depth her novels and memoir. She finds that although Rushing considered herself a regional writer, her fiction transcends region in illuminating what has motivated and sustained the western frontier’s settlers and their descendants. In addition to her novels, Rushing co-authored with Kline A. Nall a history of Texas Tech University. Her final book, Starting from Pyron, explores the history and people of the community she grew up in and that inspired her writing.
Rushing, who had lived in Lubbock for most of her career, died of cancer in 1997, at the age of seventy-one. She was survived by her husband Jay and her son, James Arthur, Jr., a German Language professor at Rutgers University.

Books

Walnut Grove. Doubleday, New York. OCLC 1379605Against the Moon. Doubleday, Garden City, New York. LCCN 68014166 Geh Schlafen, Mein Herz, es ist Zeit: Familienroman aus Texas. Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg. ASIN B0026O9O50Tamzen. Doubleday, Garden City, New York. Mary Dove: A Love Story. Doubleday, Garden City, New York.,, Evolution of a University: Texas Tech's First Fifty Years. With Kline A. Nall. Madrona Press, Austin, Texas., The Raincrow. Doubleday, Garden City, New York. Covenant of Grace: A Novel of Anne Hutchinson. Doubleday, Garden City, New York. Winds of Blame. Doubleday, Garden City, New York. Starting from Pyron. With photographs by Billie Roche Barnard; introduction by A.C. Greene. Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock, Texas.,

Awards and honors