The search for George Sessions Perry, missing from his riverside home in Connecticut, entered its second month on Jan. 13, 1957 with no sign of the famous writer.

The future novelist and magazine contributor was born and raised in the Central Texas town of Rockdale.  His father, owner of two drug stores, and artistic mother doted on their only child gladly granting his every wish. 

Even though the Perrys did not live directly off the land, the sensitive boy empathized with the sharecroppers and tenant farmers of Milam County.  Two of his early unpublished novels were scathing indictments of the rural poverty witnessed in his youth.

The head of the household died of Bright’s disease, which destroys the kidneys, in 1921, when Perry was 11 years old.  His emotionally fragile mother quickly married again but took her own life in 1923.

According to a childhood friend, Perry felt responsible for the tragic death of his beloved mother.  “First, because his failure to give her the affection she needed caused her to remarry, and then because he did not kill the husband who had made her so unhappy.”

The orphan rebelled against his domineering and ill-tempered grandmother and an uncle, who doled out the income from his inheritance.  In response to Perry’s bad behavior and poor grades, the surrogate father packed him off to Allen Academy in Bryan, where he shaped up and finished high school.

After attending Southwestern University, Purdue and the University of Houston, Perry quit college altogether and spent six months selling shoes and lampshades in Chicago.  Deciding to see the world, he worked his way across the Atlantic aboard a freighter but was caught without a passport in France and deported to the United States. 

Perry sweet-talked his uncle into giving him some traveling money and returned to Europe.  Half a year in Spain, France and Algeria satisfied his wanderlust and rekindled his interest in writing.

In 1931 Perry came back to the Lone Star State and married Claire Hodges, a coed he met at Southwestern.  The newlyweds moved into the family home with his grandmother and struggled to survive on $100 a month from the groom’s inheritance.

Over the next six years, the aspiring author produced six novels and more than 50 short stories, all with rural Texas settings, but never got so much as a nibble from publishing houses and national magazines.  

Perry surely would have given up without the steadfast support and encouragement of his self-sacrificing soul mate.   Claire not only translated his scrawl into neatly typed manuscripts and corrected his grammar but also stood up to her husband’s dictatorial granny, something his own mother had never done.

His big break came at last in 1937.  The Saturday Evening Post finally accepted one of Perry’s submissions and, Doubleday bought his first novel, Walls Rise Up, the comic tale of three Brazos River vagrants.  Within two years, he sold a dozen more short stories and went to Hollywood to work on a movie script.

Hold Autumn in Your Hand, generally considered the best depiction of agrarian life in Texas, was published in 1941.  The critically acclaimed book won the Texas Institute of Letters award and the National Book Award for the 31 year old novelist and inspired the 1945 motion picture “The Southerner” starring native Texan Zachary Scott.

Perry felt humiliated by his rejection for military service in World War II due to a stiff elbow suffered in a fall from a horse.  Determined to do his patriotic part, he went overseas as a civilian war correspondent and covered the Allied landings on Sicily in 1943.

Perry was so traumatized by the horrors of combat that he could never again bring himself to write fiction.  Light-hearted yarns about the colorful folk of the Texas countryside seemed sacrilegious after what he had seen.   

Perry stayed busy, however, knocking out 57 magazine pieces, most for the Saturday Evening Post and its sister periodical the Country Gentleman, between 1945 and 1950.  Twenty-four of those articles were for The Post’s popular “Cities of America” series, an ironic assignment for someone who openly despised urban life.

In the early 1950’s, Perry’s output dropped to six or seven articles a year.  His sole book-length project was the 75th anniversary history of Texas A&M.

Arthritis of the spine made writing more and more difficult.  For years, Perry had put off seeing a doctor for the crippling condition, preferring instead to medicate himself with whiskey, and by 1954 he was an alcoholic wreck haunted by voices and hallucinations.

Shortly before the tormented Texan disappeared in December 1956, the friend who would identify his body two months later dropped by the author’s Connecticut home.  “The best thing I can do in this depressed state,” George Sessions Perry told the visitor, “is either jump into the river and swim to the north pole or run into the woods until I drop.”

The 45 year old basket-case must have tried to do the former because it was in the river that flowed past his home that searchers finally found his remains.

Get the inside story on Mexia, Roaring Ranger, Desdemona and Bloody Borger in “Texas Boomtowns: A History of Blood and Oil.”  Order your autographed copy with a check for $28.80 to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549 or on-line at barteehaile.com.