A book by a local author that features a now mostly forgotten Fort Worth scandal rippling through the country club set is coming back.
“The Inheritors,” by Philip Atlee, whose real name is James Young Phillips, is a scathing debut novel from a then-25-year-old author who grew up among the monied elite in and around the River Crest Country Club. Now, 86 years after the uproar that caused the Fort Worth Public Library to reportedly keep its copy under lock and key, TCU Press is bringing the book back.
This TCU Press edition, set for publication Sept. 15, will be the first time the book has been formally published and widely available to readers since its original release by Dial Press in 1940. When World War II began, paper was rationed and book publishing slowed to a crawl. A paperback edition, published with the title “The Naked Year,” was published by Lion Books in 1954. Since then, editions of “The Inheritors” have been hard to come by with copies going for as much as $5,000 in the collector’s markets, said Dan Williams, director of TCU Press.
“Collectors are going to hate us,” Williams said.
The TCU Press edition, a trade paperback, will retail for $26.95. The book is available for preorder.
Williams is proud that a book publisher in Phillips’ hometown is republishing the book.
“It just seemed a natural fit for TCU Press and Fort Worth to come out with it again,” he said.
In finding a decent copy to scan for the new edition, TCU Press was able to find one close to home: TCU’s Mary Couts Burnett Library, just a few blocks from the TCU Press offices.
“That was the best copy we found, and it was in great shape,” he said. “I think it was meant to be.”
“No Fixed Abode,” the autobiography of Fort Worth author James Atlee Phillips, was published by TCU Press in 2025. (Courtesy photo | TCU Press)
TCU Press published Phillips’ memoir, “No Fixed Abode,” in 2025.
Williams noted that, local interest aside, “The Inheritors” received rave reviews when it was released.
Book trade publication Kirkus called it “a full-blooded job, written in a virile, vital prose style” and compared it to the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
Author George Sessions Perry anthologized it alongside John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
That was how the national press saw the book, Williams said.
In Texas, reviewers — if they mentioned it at all — panned it.
Phillips’ hometown paper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, called it the work of “a somewhat immature and confused young man.”
The reasons for this reaction are many, said Williams, but the main one is that the book, set in 1935 among the idle, entitled sons and daughters of the country club set, laid bare their moral hypocrisy for all the world to see.
Fort Worth author E.R. Bills gave a presentation on the book and its controversy during a 2024 event sponsored by TCU. He wrote the introduction to the new edition.
The novel was ahead of its time in 1940, Bills said. “It pulls no punches,” he said.
The first chapter begins with the main character, based on Phillips himself, waking with a hangover, followed by sophomoric episodes of masculine debauchery, Bills said.
“For the next two dozen chapters, they drink, chase girls, pursue a questionable, easy-money grift for liquor money and express profoundly dim views of country club gaiety and undermine the entire Cowtown dollar aristocracy,” he said.
The book has some harsh descriptions of the wealthy, Bills said.
He recounted how Phillips, through main character George Jimble, described the members of the country club during a party there: “‘Maybe they ought to lock the people up in the bank vault and let the money do the living.’ That’s pretty harsh,” he said.
While copies of the book were sold in Fort Worth following publication, they were not often on display.
Allegedly, for an additional amount, the book would come with a “key,” listing the real people the characters in the book were based on, Bills said, though he has never seen a copy with that list attached.
Bills said it was little surprise the characters cut so close to the truth, as Phillips’ family were solid members of the city’s elite.
The author’s father, Edwin Phillips Sr., was a successful attorney who died at 37, when his son was 13.
His mother was Mary Louise Phillips, who served on the Fort Worth ISD board of education from 1935 to 1941. She was also head of “industrial development” for the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. An elementary school on the city’s west side is named after her.
The combination of the reaction to the book and the paper rationing during the war meant that the book effectively ceased to exist, said Williams.
“That and the fact there was no follow up,” he said.
Still, its fame persisted.
Texas author and critic A.C. Greene included “The Inheritors” on his list of “The Fifty Best Texas Books,” initially published by Texas Monthly in 1981.
Even Phillips’ son didn’t have a copy until after his father died in 1991.
“I knew about it, but I didn’t have a copy,” said Liam Phillips, who runs a production company in Los Angeles. He wrote the foreword for the new edition.
“The novel was barely mentioned during the 21 years I lived with my father and mother,” he said.
The outrage that followed its publication was just a piece of “family folklore,” he said.
After the uproar, Phillips stopped writing literary fiction and found success writing scripts for films and popular fiction.
He authored a couple of notable films including 1952’s “Big Jim McLain,” starring John Wayne, and the 1958 cult classic “Thunder Road” starring Robert Mitchum as a fast-driving moonshiner.
But Phillips found his biggest success writing a series of mystery and spy novels starring a character named Joe Gall. The novels remain in print.
Phillips wrote many of those books while traveling the world on freighter ships, according to his autobiography. He would apparently book passage on those ships and, packing along his typewriter, write the novels using much of the local color he encountered in his journeys.
That man with the peripatetic lifestyle was more the father Liam Phillips knew. He believes his father was deeply hurt by the reaction to “The Inheritors.”
“He was only 25 when it came out, so he wrote this great book when he was likely 23 or 24,” he said. “I find that amazing.”
Along with the reaction to the book, there was another heartbreak in his life. His first marriage failed and his former wife struggled with an incurable disease.
“Those events, along with the early death of his father, impacted him, I believe,” Liam Phillips said.
He’s proud that his father’s first novel will see the light of day again. Parts of the novel still get to him when he reads it.
“As I learned when I was helping get his memoir published, my father had a life long before I knew him,” he said.
But all that led to a book that is still relevant, Liam Phillips believes.
“I can think of no other modern novel so utterly forgotten and abandoned that in retrospect is now considered a legitimate American classic,” he writes in the foreword to the new edition.
“I believe that,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s mentioned in the same breath as ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ by accident. It has some real grit to it.”
The return of the book would bring a smile to his father’s face, he said.
“All those people that were outraged, even members of his own family, would be sad to see that the book has continued to rise like a phoenix,” he said. “My father would love that.”
Bob Francis is business editor for the Fort Worth Report. Email him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org.
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