The vagaries of literary fame

 This Novelist’s Censored Masterpiece Was Impossible to Find. Now It’s Back.

The book was roundly panned in Texas: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote that Phillips’s “ ‘tell all’ ” suffered from “an overextension of candor,” penned by a “somewhat immature and confused young man.” But the national press was encouraging, commending the book’s critical look at the debaucherous, wealthy elite, comparing it to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and its fresh and inventive prose to Hemingway’s, James M. Cain’s, and John O’Hara’s. Excerpts from The Inheritors were included in a 1943 anthology alongside pieces of works by John Steinbeck and Oliver La Farge; it was later considered by some critics a more mature forebear of Catcher in the Rye. In 1981 it was listed in this magazine, by critic A.C. Greene, as among the fifty best books on Texas.

sch 9/22