Long Fiction:
Leaving Home, 1985
A Shroud in the Family, 1987
Hardscrub, 1990
To a Widow with Children, 1994
Short Fiction:
I Can Hear the Cowbells Ring, 1994
The Day They Took My Uncle, and Other Stories, 2001
Drama:
An Acorn on the Moon, pr. 1995
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
The Elephant and the Ant, 2000
Born in 1935 in the remote brush country of Texas near the Mexican border to Gonzalo Guzman and Maria Saenz García, Lionel C. García was later to write fiction for nearly three decades before seeing significant publication of and attention to his works. A regional writer, García has lived most of his life in this desolate, dirt-ridden part of the United States.
Interested in science and biology, García entered Texas A&M University. He earned a B.S. in 1956; he also took classes in and otherwise pursued creative writing as an undergraduate. García twice served two-year terms in the U.S. Army, the first of which was in 1957-1958. A year after leaving the military, he married Noemi Barrera. He returned to active duty in 1959.
Resolved not to pursue a military career, he returned to Texas A&M in the early 1960’s, where he eventually earned the D.V.M. degree, which would provide most of his life’s work outside the literary world. He became a practicing veterinarian in the late 1960’s, after spending three years as an assistant professor of anatomy, again at Texas A&M. Perhaps surprisingly, though, he makes little use of his biology and primary profession in his fiction.
While serving in the military and teaching college classes, García’s side interest–perhaps at heart it was always his main one–was writing short stories. He had published his first story in the undergraduate literary magazine during his senior year of college, continuing to write thereafter. It was not until 1983, however, that he would receive recognition for his work; he was awarded the PEN Southwest Discovery Prize for his first novel, Leaving Home, which at the time was unpublished.
Like the terrain in South Texas, García’s characters–while colorful–are often bleak and desolate in their attitudes and behavior. Both Leaving Home and A Shroud in the Family are about family life among first-and second-generation immigrants coming from Mexico to Texas. About this time, he also began to give public readings of his fiction, a mode of performance that well serves his storytelling abilities.
His next novel, Hardscrub, is set in the 1950’s and also tells of a family confronting the problems of everyday life in South Texas. It won several honors, all regional in nature, including the Texas Literary Award. In the mid-1990’s García changed his focus to other subgenres of fiction: He published the highly autobiographical collection of personal writings titled I Can Hear the Cowbells Ring, and he tried his luck with a play called An Acorn on the Moon, which was locally produced but never published. He also wrote a children’s book, The Elephant and the Ant. In the late 1990’s he collected his stories, most of which had been previously published, in The Day They Took My Uncle, and Other Stories. García’s works have generally been well received as popular writings of fiction, regional in scope but more than expansive in their appreciation of the experience of Mexican immigrants coming to make lives in the southwestern United States.