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Stephen Harrigan

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in Oklahoma City, The United States

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Stephen Harrigan was born in Oklahoma City in 1948 and has lived in Texas since the age of five, growing up in Abilene and Corpus Christi. He is a longtime writer for Texas Monthly, and his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of other publications as well, including The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Audubon, Travel Holiday, Life, American History, National Geographic and Slate. His film column for Texas Monthly was a finalist for the 2015 National Magazine Awards.
Harrigan is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Gates of the Alamo, which became a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and received a number of awards, including the TCU Texas Book Award, th Stephen Harrigan was born in Oklahoma City in 1948 and has lived in Texas since the age of five, growing up in Abilene and Corpus Christi. He is a longtime writer for Texas Monthly, and his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of other publications as well, including The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Audubon, Travel Holiday, Life, American History, National Geographic and Slate. His film column for Texas Monthly was a finalist for the 2015 National Magazine Awards.
Harrigan is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Gates of the Alamo, which became a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and received a number of awards, including the TCU Texas Book Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Spur Award for Best Novel of the West.Remember Ben Clayton was published by Knopf in 2011 and praised by Booklist as a "stunning work of art" and by The Wall Street Journal as a "a poignantly human monument to our history." Remember Ben Clayton also won a Spur Award, as well as the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, given by the Society of American Historians for the best work of historical fiction. In the Spring of 2013, the University of Texas Press published a career-spanning volume of his essays, The Eye of the Mammoth, which reviewers called “masterful” (from a starred review in Publishers Weekly), “enchanting and irresistible” (the Dallas Morning News) and written with “acuity and matchless prose.”(Booklist). His latest novel is A Friend of Mr. Lincoln.
Among the many movies Harrigan has written for television are HBO’s award-winning The Last of His Tribe, starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene, and King of Texas, a western retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear for TNT, which starred Patrick Stewart, Marcia Gay Harden, and Roy Scheider. His most recent television production was The Colt, an adaptation of a short story by the Nobel-prize winning author Mikhail Sholokhov, which aired on The Hallmark Channel. For his screenplay of The Colt, Harrigan was nominated for a Writers Guild Award and the Humanitas Prize. Young Caesar, a feature adaptation of Conn Iggulden’s Emperor novels, which he co-wrote with William Broyles, Jr., is currently in development with Exclusive Media.
A 1971 graduate of the University of Texas, Harrigan lives in Austin, where he is a faculty fellow at UT’s James A. Michener Center for Writers and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly. He is also a founding member of CAST (Capital Area Statues, Inc.) an organization in Austin that commissions monumental works of art as gifts to the city. He is the recipient of the Texas Book Festival’s Texas Writers Award, the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters, and was recently inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. Stephen Harrigan and his wife Sue Ellen have three daughters and four grandchildren.
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Average rating: 4.06 · 5,293 ratings · 855 reviews · 28 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Gates of the Alamo 4.06 avg rating — 1,856 ratings — published 2000 — 22 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Remember Ben Clayton 4.18 avg rating — 733 ratings — published 2011 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Leopard Is Loose 3.88 avg rating — 783 ratings — published 2022 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas (The Texas Bookshelf) 4.57 avg rating — 563 ratings — published 2019 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Friend of Mr. Lincoln 3.78 avg rating — 639 ratings — published 2016 — 10 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Challenger Park 3.41 avg rating — 169 ratings — published 2006 — 15 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Sorrowful Mysteries: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century 3.74 avg rating — 144 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Jacob's well: A novel 4.02 avg rating — 100 ratings — published 1984 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Aransas 4.22 avg rating — 89 ratings — published 1980 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	They Came from the Sky: The Spanish Arrive in Texas 4.16 avg rating — 31 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quiet Street: On American Privilege

by Nick McDonell (Goodreads Author)

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Aug 22, 2023 12:40PM

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My Name Is Lucy Barton (Amgash #1)

by Elizabeth Strout (Goodreads Author)

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Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

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Stephen Harrigan made a comment on Patrick’s review of Sorrowful Mysteries: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century " I make it a point never to comment on reviews. You’re entitled to your opinion of my book, but please don’t think you have the right to claim that I “ ...more "
Jan 03, 2026 11:39AM · see review
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Quotes by Stephen Harrigan (?)

“He watched the young actress playing the central part of a wife who mistakenly believes her husband has wronged her. She was overly trained in the teapot school of acting, striking expressive poses and attitudes as the mood of the story demanded.”
― Stephen Harrigan, A Friend of Mr. Lincoln

tags: american-litaerature, frontier, historical-fiction, illinois, lincoln

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“They also, in the worried opinion of one Mexican official, “go about with their constitution in their pocket,” never quite accepting that they had become foreign citizens in a foreign land.”
― Stephen Harrigan, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas

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“Austin confided as much in his private correspondence. “Strangers to each other,” he wrote, “to me, and to the laws and languages of the country, they come here with all the ideas of americans and expect to see and understand the laws they are governed by, and many very many of them have all the licentiousness and wild turbulence of frontiersmen.”
― Stephen Harrigan, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas

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