J. Frank Dobie (1888-1964), Professor of English at the University of Texas and a respected writer on Western American topics, was between 1922 and 1943 Secretary/Editor of the Texas Folklore Society as well as a prominent figure on the national folklore scene. Dobie's unapologetic passion for Southwestern folklore as a source for written literature capable of both shaping regional identity and transcending the limitations of regionalism often appears at odds with views held by other American folklorists and literary scholars. Nevertheless, Dobie's views reflect philosophical, literary and nationalist positions held by other folklore collectors since the 17th century.

Dobie's most important works, including CORONADO'S CHILDREN (1930) and APACHE GOLD AND YAQUI SILVER (1939), two collections of treasure legends; TONGUES OF THE MONTE (1935), a fictionalized treatment of Mexican folklore; and THE LONGHORNS (1941), VOICE OF THE COYOTE (1949), and THE MUSTANGS (1952), three historically-framed studies of folkloric traditions regarding natural history and animal behavior, all attempted to place traditional, largely oral material in a setting combining oral immediacy with the stylistic strength and permanence of a literary text.

Since two recent histories of American folkloristics, Rosemary Levy Zumwalt's AMERICAN FOLKLORE SCHOLARSHIP (1988), and Simon J. Bronner's AMERICAN FOLKLORE STUDIES (1986) fail to mention him at all, my dissertation examines Dobie's early career, until 1931, against an intellectual history of folkloristics. Instead of comparing Dobie solely to other Texas or Western writers of his time, I examine his folklore interests in comparison to those of Montaigne, Vico, Hamann, Herder, Mallet, Percy, the Grimms and Lonnrot as well as to Americans George Lyman Kittredge, Francis James Child, Franz Boas, John A. Lomax, Stith Thompson, and other early leaders in American folkloristics. Consequently, I look at his career as less the paradigm of the Texas/Southwestern writer warily facing the modern world than as an individual example of a longer paradigm of intellectual development in an atmosphere of scholarship, personal and national self-recognition itself reshaped by investigation into and popularization of folklore.