The Wonderful Country

by Tom Lea

Overview

Originally published in 1952, Tom Lea’s The Wonderful Country opens as mejicano pistolero Martín Bredi is returning to El Puerto (El Paso) after a fourteen-year absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan warlord Cipriano Castro and is on Castro’s business in Texas. Fourteen years earlier—shortly after the end of the Civil War—when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martín Bredi.

Back in Texas Brady breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills a man. When Brady/Bredi returns to Mexico, the Castros distrust him as an American. He becomes a man without a country.

The Wonderful Country clearly depicts life along the Texas-Mexico border of a century-and-a-half ago, when Texas and Mexico were being settled and tamed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787205703
Publisher:	Borodino Books
Publication date:	06/28/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	262
Sales rank:	548,215
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Thomas Calloway “Tom” Lea, III (July 11, 1907 - January 29, 2001) was a noted American muralist, illustrator, artist, war correspondent, novelist, and historian, with particular focus on Texas, north-central Mexico, and his World War II experience in the South Pacific and Asia. Two of his most popular novels, The Brave Bulls and The Wonderful Country, are widely considered to be classics of southwestern American literature.

Born in El Paso, Texas, the son of Thomas Calloway Lea, Jr., a prominent attorney and mayor of El Paso, Lea graduated from El Paso High School in 1924 and then attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1924-1926. He apprenticed and assisted John W. Norton, a Chicago muralist, from 1927-1932.

In 1937 he began illustration work, predominantly of cowboys and the wild Texas landscapes. From 1941-1945 he travelled the world with the U.S. military, painting for LIFE as war artist and correspondent. He was on board the USS Hornet in 1942 when the USS Wasp was sunk by torpedoes from a Japanese submarine, painting several pictures of the sinking. In 1943, during his visit to China, he painted the portraits of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mei-ling; the head of the “Flying Tigers”; and General Claire Lee Chennault. He cemented his name amongst LIFE readers during the invasion of the tiny Western Pacific island of Peleliu in 1944.

In 1964 he published a novel, The Hands of Cantu, an account of horse training in 16th-century Nueva Viscaya, and his “autobiography”, A Picture Gallery, was published in 1968.

He received honorary doctorates in literature from Baylor University in 1967 and Southern Methodist University in 1970. In 1971 he received the Distinguished Public Service Award from the U.S. Navy and was inducted into the El Paso County Historical Society’s Hall of Honour in 1975. In 1992 he received the Owen Wister Award for lifelong contributions to the field of western literature.