Emily Dorothy Scarborough was an American writer who wrote about Texas, folk culture, cotton farming, ghost stories and women's life in the Southwest. Scarborough was born in Mount Carmel, Texas. At the age of four she moved to Sweetwater, Texas for her mother's health, as her mother needed the drier climate. The family soon left Sweetwater in 1887, so that the Scarborough children could get a good education at Baylor College. Even though Scarborough's writings are identified with Texas, she studied at University of Chicago and Oxford University and beginning in 1916 taught literature at Columbia University. While receiving her PhD from Columbia, she wrote a dissertation, "The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)". Sylvia Ann Grider writes in a critical introduction [1] the dissertation "was so widely acclaimed by her professors and colleagues that it was published and it has become a basic reference work." Dorothy Scarborough came in contact with many writers in New York, including Edna Ferber and Vachel Lindsay. She taught creative writing classes at Columbia. Among her creative writing students were Eric Walrond, and Carson McCullers, who took her first college writing class from Scarborough.[1] Her most critically acclaimed book, The Wind (first published anonymously in 1925), was later made into a film of the same name starring Lillian Gish.

Called the "Storyteller of the Southwest," James Frank Dobie was born in 1888 on his family's cattle ranch in Live Oak County. During his long life, J. Frank Dobie would live astride two worlds: a rugged life on a Texas cattle ranch and the state's modern centers of scholarly learning. Dobie came to Austin in 1914 to teach at the University of Texas. In time he pioneered an influential course on the literature of the Southwest. By the late 1920s, Dobie discovered his mission: to record and publicize the disappearing folklore of Texas and the greater Southwest. Dobie became secretary of the Texas Folklore Society, a position he held for 21 years. J. Frank Dobie Dobie was a new kind of folklorist—a progressive activist. He called for UT to admit African-American students in the 1940s—long before the administration favored integration. Dobie's vocal politics led to his leaving the University in 1947, but he continued writing until his death in 1964, publishing over twenty books and countless articles. The inscription on Dobie's headstone in the Texas State Cemetery reads: "I have come to value liberated minds as the supreme good of life on earth." J. Frank Dobie was not content to simply preserve Southwestern heritage within libraries and museums. He gave life to that heritage and informed generations of Texans about their rich history.