Hold Autumn in Your Hand

Zia Books

by George Sessions Perry

"The Texas January day was all blue and gold and barely crisp. Only the absence of leaves and sap, the presence of straggling bands of awkward crows, the gray-yellow flutter of field larks, and the broad, matter-of-fact hibernation of the earth said it was winter as Sam Tucker walked along the road, his long legs functioning automatically, farmerly. His body had about it the look of country dogs at the end of winter, when they are all ribs and leg muscles and jaw muscles and teeth. . . ." Hold Autumn in Your Hand, is the memorable story of Sam Tucker and the year that he contracts to farm sixty-eight acres of San Pedro bottomland. He is eager to work the rich soil despite the fact that he will earn only six bits a day. Sam, his wife Nona, their two children, and one of the most irrepressible grandmothers in modern fiction absorb the reader in their joys and disappointments. The story is built around Sam Tucker's determination to use his knowledge of the land and hard work to provide food for his family and hope for the future.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Westerns, Literature

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Virtually unknown today, Perry was one of Texas’ most celebrated authors in the 1940s and 50s.

Born in Rockdale in 1910, Perry attended several colleges, but never graduated. Instead, he moved back to his hometown and pushed through the Great Depression with a small inheritance and a determination to write about the rural and small-town life around him. He married the love of his life, Claire Hodges, on the 20th of February 1933 in her hometown of Beaumont, Texas. They would remain devoted to each other until his death, and had no children.

Publication in the Saturday Evening Post came in 1937, then a book deal. In 1941 came his masterwork, “Hold Autumn in Your Hand” — one of America’s most celebrated agrarian novels oft compared to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It won the Texas Institute of Letters award that year, became the first Texas book to win the National Book Award the next, and was made into a movie called The Southerner by famed French director Jean Renoir. It was to be his only novel.

Perry served as a war correspondent during World War II and so traumatized by the horrors he witnessed that he said it “defictionized” him for life. His subsequent work, no longer light-hearted, concentrated on nonfiction, including “My Granny Van” — about the maternal grandmother who raised him when he was orphaned at the age of 12 — and a history of Texas A&M University. Perry became a celebrated and well-paid magazine writer by the late 1940s.

Wracked by depression, hallucinations, acute arthritis and a drinking problem, in winter 1956 he walked out of his Connecticut home and into a nearby river; his body was found months later.