Author's Note
I'm a journalist, biographer, and novelist with twelve books and scores of magazine articles and essays published over a forty-five year period. In 2014 the Texas Institute of Letters awarded me its Lon Tinkle Award for career achievement. My wife Dorothy Browne and I make our home in Austin.
Let the People In, my University of Texas Press biography of the late 1990's Texas governor Ann Richards, was published in 2012. The biography won awards from the Texas State Historical Association and the Philosophical Society of Texas for their choices as the best nonfiction book published that year. The Washington Post and Texas Monthly, among many other publications and former President Bill Clinton, gave the book high marks; the Houston Chronicle listed it as one of the ten best nonfiction books published in the country in 2012. Two years earlier, Texas Tornado, my biography of rock singer Doug Sahm, which I wrote with the help from his son Shawn Sahm, was honored as an Oxford Magazine Music Book of the Year.
Recently Texas Monthly and Penguin/Random House released as one of the magazine's classics an hour-long audio of my 1976 article "Busting Out of Mexico," an achievement of both reporting and style that gave strong direction to many more articles and especially my memoir The Bullet Meant for Me (2002) and Rio Grande, an anthology of writing and photography I edited with an extensive text (2004). "Busting Out of Mexico" has recently been optioned for an adapted screen or television film.
But my first love has always been fiction. My first novel, Deerinwater, was published in 1985 with help along the way from a prestigious Dobie-Paisano Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters.
Set in nineteenth century Texas, New Mexico Territory, and northern Mexico, my second novel Comanche Sundown roamed through the end of the Indian wars in my native region and won the Texas Institute of Letters' 2010 Jesse H. Jones Award for the best fiction published the preceding year.
My third novel, Sins of the Younger Sons, came out in June 2017. Placing a ranch-reared Texan and a love story amid the separatist strife in the Basque Country of Spain and France, with scenes on the ranch, in San Antonio, and in the rain forest of Ecuador, the novel again won the Texas Institute of Letters' Jesse H. Jones Award for the fiction of the year. Both of these novels were published by the valiant and distinguished TCU Press. Previous winners of the 51-year-old Jesse H. Jones award include Katherine Anne Porter, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Donald Barthelme, C.W. Smith, Shelby Hearon, Beverly Lowry, Stephen Harrigan, Sarah Bird, and Elizabeth Crook. It is a flabbergasting honor to be included in the ranks of those artists. Only a handful of writers have won the award twice.
And the answer now is, Yes — a fourth novel is on the way.
Biography
Born in Abilene, Texas in 1945, Jan Reid grew up in the oil town of Wichita Falls. After graduating from Midwestern University, he took a master’s degree in American studies at the University of Texas in Austin. 
While working as a reporter for the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, he became one of the lead contributors of the newborn Texas Monthly. His third feature for that magazine spawned his first book, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, a pop culture classic about the explosion of country-folk-rock music in Austin, first published in 1974 and still in print. Then he switched gears: two Texas Monthly stories, “Busting Out of Mexico,” about a jailbreak in the border town of Piedras Negras, and “The Texan and His Gun,” which triggered an avalanche of angry mail, announced his arrival as a veteran reporter and nonfiction stylist.
Simultaneously, a coveted Dobie-Paisano fellowship allowed him to start his first novel, Deerinwater, which was published in 1985. But for a while magazine writing continued to define him. In addition to Texas Monthly, his widely varied freelance articles appeared in Esquire, GQ, Men’s Journal, Garden & Gun, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, and other magazines. His stories have won awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, PEN, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His nonfiction has been anthologized in The Best of Texas Monthly, The Slate Diaries, Best American Sportswriting, Tales of Texoma: Episodes in the History of the Red River Border, and Cat’s Cradles: Writers on Research.
Reid has written seven nonfiction books and co-authored three others. He is proudest of The Bullet Meant for Me, a 2002 memoir of falling prey to a robbery in Mexico City and his recovery from near-fatal injuries and paraplegia, and his 2012 biography of a late friend and Texas governor, Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards.
Though best known for his nonfiction, Reid’s first love has always been fiction. Comanche Sundown, propelled by the last Comanche war chief, Quanah Parker, and Bose Ikard, a freed slave cowboy, won the Texas Institute’s fiction of the year published in 2010. And in a dramatic change of themes and settings, in 2017 his third novel is Sins of the Younger Sons, a ranch-reared Texan’s love story that unfolds amid the exotic history and conflict of the Basque Country of France and Spain.
Once more the Texas Institute of Letters awarded Jan with its coveted best fiction prize for his latest novel. Overcoming a host of setbacks and detours — among them the harsh experience that spawned The Bullet Meant for Me — Jan refused to give up on Comanche Sundown and Sins of the Younger Sons for over thirty years. He ranks those three as his best books.
Jan makes his home in Austin with his wife Dorothy Browne and their collie Gus. In 2014 the Texas Institute of Letters honored Reid with its Lonn Tinkle award for lifetime career achievement.
Jan at work in his office in Austin, TX.
Jan interviews rancher Jep White in the 1970s