Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2006
Abstract
Like the work of art it documents, Terry Allen's book is a multifaceted, multimedia chronicle of growing up in postwar west Texas. Allen, a visual artist and musician from Lubbock, is known for sprawling narrative epics conveyed through drawings, sculptures, assemblages, tableaux, written texts, music, and performances. Leaping back and forth across the decades, Dugout is loosely based on his parents' stories of their hardscrabble lives in the early twentieth century and the widespread fear of Martians, Communists, polio, Thalidomide, and The Bomb during Allen's own adolescence. "The language of the 1950's West Texas living room," he writes, "is nerve wracking."
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:3 (Summer 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.