Paulette Jiles, an award-winning and best-selling novelist and poet who spent the last 30-plus years living and writing in San Antonio and in the Texas Hill Country, died on July 8. She was 82.
Jiles said in her blog that she had been recently diagnosed with a form of non-alcoholic cirrhosis.
A Missouri native, Jiles lived in Canada for several years mainly as a poet and a reporter before returning to the United States where she married and moved to San Antonio and then the Hill Country to become a novelist. She sold more than 800,000 books across North America.
Jiles said in past interviews that living in rural Texas and her Civil War research greatly influenced her works. Many literary critics called Jiles a contemporary master of the western novel, alongside the likes of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy.
“Some people are just born with a love of landscape or the outdoors, or gardening, or raising large animals, or searching through the non-urban world for treasure,” Jiles said in a 2017 interview with the Read Her Like an Open Book blog. “It’s in your DNA or something. I am one of those people.”
While in Canada, Jiles put her creative writing skills to use. In 1973, she published Waterloo Express, a collection of original poems, followed by another poetry collection, Celestial Navigation, in 1984. The latter earned Jiles literary honors, such as the 1984 Governor General’s Award for English Poetry.
The mid-1980s saw Jiles start to concentrate more on long-form fictional prose with works such as Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola: A Manual of Etiquette for Ladies Crossing Canada by Train.
The illustrated period piece — blending detective noir, humor and romance — garnered Jiles even more acclaim, and was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, a Canadian literary award.
Jiles’ late 1980s novel, The Late Great Human Show, a dramatic post-apocalypse novel, was nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award. She published three more collections of poetry and prose in the late ’80s before a chance meeting during a trip to the Missouri Ozarks in 1989 resulted in Jiles’ lone marriage, and served as the impetus for her next book, Cousins.
That memoir follows Jiles as she meets Jim Johnson, a married retired Army officer and a Vietnam veteran with whom she had many disagreements.
As described in a 2020 Texas Monthly story, Johnson left an unhappy marriage to another woman, and joined Jiles on a months-long journey across the U.S. Midwest and South, where she sought to interview her 24 estranged first cousins and get a clearer picture on her upbringing.
By the time Cousins released in 1992, Jiles and Johnson were married and had moved to San Antonio, where Johnson was previously stationed with the U.S. Army.
They found temporary housing at the home of renowned local novelist and poet Naomi Nye and husband, documentarian Michael Nye, when the Nyes launched a six-month stay in Hawaii.
According to Nancy Cook-Monroe’s 2016 story for the San Antonio Report, Jiles and Johnson briefly lived at another San Antonio residence, in Mexico and Germany before settling down in a 1880s Southtown home.
There, Jiles produced her first novel, 2002’s Enemy Women, a Civil War-era piece that tells the story of a young woman who finds love and hope amid the carnage and betrayal that she and her family experience during the conflict.
Enemy Women won Jiles another Canadian literary award — the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The success of Enemy Women elevated Jiles’ writing career, but her marriage to Johnson back home soured, and the couple amicably divorced in 2003. Johnson kept the Southtown home, where he died in 2016, and Jiles bought 30-plus acres of ranchland near Utopia, an unincorporated community located 80 miles west of San Antonio.
The cover of News of the World by Paulette Jiles. Credit: Courtesy / Paulette Jiles’ blog
At her ranch, Jiles produced six more novels, including 2016’s News of the World, which was turned into a film starring Tom Hanks in 2020. Set in the post-Civil War landscape, News of the World has war veteran Jefferson Kidd charging people in small Texas communities to hear him read news from distant places.
A friend then asks Kidd a dangerous favor — to escort a young former captive of the Kiowa tribe back to her family that may no longer want her.
News of the World won rave reviews, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Jiles’ final published book, 2023’s Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance, is also set in the post-Civil War frontier. However, not all of her novels were set during or after the Civil War; 2007’s Stormy Weather is a familial drama that plays out against the backdrop of Depression-era East Texas.
In her blog, Jiles often acknowledged the praise that critics and fans bestowed upon her westerns, citing a specific Amazon reviewer in one blog entry: “Binding these stories together is a closely researched, vividly described social and geographic landscape — Texas, caught among marauding Indians, post-war bitterness and corruption, civil anarchy, and vigilante justice, struggling toward a civil society which shows itself in glimmers.”
Jiles’ longtime editor Jennifer Brehl recalled Jiles — or “Polly” as she was known to many — caring greatly about language, place and character in creative writing.
“She was a wonderful friend, a brilliant writer who cared so much about the placement and nuance of every word she wrote,” Brehl said. “She esteemed and believed in the power of the written word. She hated oversentimentality. Her prose was spare and elegant and true.”
Brehl, and other colleagues and friends also recalled Jiles embracing life in Utopia, which included singing in church, enjoying time with her horse, mule and cats, and playing the penny whistle in a local band, Pickin’ on the Porch.
Jiles’ final blog entries were about the increasing severity of symptoms related to her recently diagnosed illness. But a previous blog post covered her love of friends and adventures in rural Texas.
“There has been nobody to talk books with, I’ve of course been outside the Texas literary establishment, which is urban, so very urban,” Jiles wrote May 31. “But I wouldn’t trade all this for the awards and cocktail parties and the seminars and the other various gatherings.”
Anyone can read the first five chapters of Jiles’ unfinished script for a post-apocalypse/fantasy novel, titled “The Tavern at the End of the World.”
“(Jiles) was very eager to finish and show me her new work, but that wasn’t meant to be,” Brehl said.
A celebration of life will be held July 20 at Utopia Methodist Church.