Tom Lea: The Novelist PT.1

Who wrote the best book about the King Ranch? What books did Tom Lea write?

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Tom Lea, an acclaimed painter, muralist, and historian, was also a novelist and book illustrator, having written a total of ten novels. Below are just some of the many books that he wrote during his career.

King Ranch:

Tom Lea. (1973) April Morning on the Stock Route; Barkly Tablelands [Oil on Canvas] 30 X 24. Collection of Kings Ranch, Kingsville. Copyr. Lea Weeks

In the 1950s and 1960s, Lea wrote and illustrated novels, an autobiography, and a two-volume history, The King Ranch. Considered to be one of the best books to accurately portray King Ranch and capture the first hundred years of its history. To learn more about King Ranch, visit our Tom Lea Trail mobile site.

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Randado:

Front Cover from Randado by Tom Lea. Carl Hertzog, 1941.

Lea’s first written piece, titled "Randado," featured Lea’s drawings alongside the text.

“I had the opportunity to spend a little time all by myself at the ruin of one of the outbuildings near the horse tank of the old Spanish ranch, Randado, they call it 'Randa’o' down there. A great strain of Spanish horses was raised there in the old Rancho Randado. And I wrote a piece about my feelings about it.”

“The poem that I wrote was about horses of two colors, the bayo coyote and the grullo. The bayo coyote was the line-back dun, and the grullo is the gray of the sandhill crane. I think the cowboys call it a mouse gray.” - Tom Lea

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The Brave Bulls:

In 1951, the first published bestselling novel was titled The Brave Bulls, which included illustrations alongside the text.

The novel was adapted into a Hollywood movie by Columbia Pictures and starred Mel Ferrer and Anthony Quinn, and was released in 1951 with the world premiere held at El Paso’s Plaza Theater.

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The Wonderful Country:

In 1959, Lea wrote and illustrated the bestseller The Wonderful Country.

“I wanted to do something that had been in my mind since I was a kid; write about this borderland and about the people on both sides of the river. That’s The Wonderful Country. A lot of the characters in The Wonderful Country are people that have been part of my life.”

The Literary Guild took The Wonderful Country on as one of their books. It was an alternate choice for the month. The book was translated in Spain, called La Frontera.

The novel was adapted into a Hollywood movie with its world premiere at El Paso’s Plaza Theatre.

Tom Lea had a small feature in the film as Peebles, the barber, where he gave Bob Mitchum a shave and a bath.

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The Primal Yoke:

Front Cover. The Primal Yoke: A Novel by Tom Lea. Little, Brown and Company, 1960

One of the final novels Tom Lea wrote was The Primal Yoke.

“When I got through with The King Ranch, I already knew what I wanted to do, and that was to write a novel about those high mountains. And I thought it could combine or weld it into experience about the war, so I made the principal character a marine just home from the Pacific. The coconuts and the pines were such a contrast. I took great pleasure in writing the whole story. Thus was about a family in the mountains; they were skiers and mountain climbers and all the rest of it.