Richard Clay Reynolds (September 28, 1949 – April 14, 2022) was a Texan novelist, essayist, book critic and English professor. Author of more than 10 books of fiction, five books of nonfiction, hundreds of published essays and 1000+ critical book reviews, he lived and taught at universities in Texas and elsewhere.
Early life and education
Reynolds grew up in Quanah (roughly halfway between the Texas cities of Dallas and Amarillo). His father (Jessie Wrex) was a railroad man who moved to Quanah from the nearby town of Acme, Texas after returning from World War II. There he met and later married Pauline Faught, who came from Eldorado, Oklahoma.
Although considered a "city boy," by Quanah's residents, Reynolds did farm and ranch work during the summers and frequented the public library. Looking back, he came to appreciate growing up in Quanah, writing "I received a good education in values and human nature, although not much in the way of formal learning." During high school, Reynolds wrote later, "along with John Knowles, (Larry) McMurtry was my most astounding literary discovery...." A few years after high school, Reynolds was introduced to Larry McMurtry in Archer City; he wrote that the meeting left him feeling "more than a little overwhelmed. It wasn't so much that he (McMurtry) was a "real" writer ... it was more that he was a writer from Texas, my Texas, West Texas. Writers weren't supposed to come from there." Later, Reynolds' own fiction would be compared to that of McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy.
Reynolds enrolled at Trinity University in San Antonio to study drama, and then transferred to the University of Texas at Austin where he received a degree in history in 1971. Later, he returned to Trinity for a master's degree in English with a specialization in 20th century American literature in 1974. Finally he received his Ph.D. in Modern Literature from University of Tulsa in 1979. His revised dissertation was later published by Whitston Publishing under the title Stage Left: The Development of the American Social Drama in the Thirties.
Academic career
After receiving his PhD in 1986, Reynolds continued at Lamar University as associate professor of English until 1988, when he moved to be full professor of English and novelist-in-residence at University of North Texas at Denton from 1988 to 1992. He resigned to work as a full-time writer and accepted short-term teaching assignments at various universities: Villanova University, West Texas A & M University, Texas Woman's University, and the University of South Dakota. In 1998 he was appointed associate professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he taught until retirement, serving for six years as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and College Master in the School of Arts and Humanities. Eventually he became Professor and Director of Creative Writing, retiring in 2019.
Novels and short stories
According to his podcast interview with Baen Books, Reynolds started writing fiction in 1984 as a diversion from writing academic articles. In his spare time, he wrote fiction, eventually finishing two manuscripts and submitting them, one to a literary agent and one to a publisher. St. Martin's Press published both books, starting with The Vigil (the later book), which was a much smaller story than the first completed manuscript, Agatite—focusing on a mother searching for her missing daughter who disappeared during their stopover in the fictional town of Agatite, Texas. According to a review of the Vigil in the New York Times, "Mr. Reynolds writes no-nonsense prose, and his rendering of the town of Agatite and its inhabitants, while not especially vivid, is efficient. Best of all, he knows how to create and sustain tension without resorting to sensationalism. His book, like its protagonist, has a stubborn integrity that you can't help admiring."
Franklin's Crossing (1993) is in the words of one critic his "big" book (688 pages) and "his most overtly historic novel...a frontier saga set a few years after the Civil War in the so-called Comanche Spring of 1874." In addition to receiving advance praise by Elmer Kelton and Larry McMurtry, the book was described by one critic as a "crass, uneasy mix of women’s romance, men’s action yarn, historical detail, and the deplorable contemporary vogue for sadistic cruelty and horror.”