God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2018. It is Wright’s most personal book — a work that combines memoir (he has lived in Austin since the 1980s), political analysis, cultural history, and reporting into a portrait of a state that he simultaneously loves and despairs of.
Wright’s argument is that Texas is not a regional curiosity but a preview of America’s future: its combination of immense wealth and grotesque inequality, cultural vitality and political regression, demographic transformation and institutional resistance to change, makes it a laboratory for the forces that are reshaping the entire country. What happens in Texas — its energy politics, its immigration dynamics, its cultural wars — happens to America a decade later.
The book moves between Austin (liberal, creative, the state’s conscience), Houston (diverse, entrepreneurial, energy-dependent), Dallas (corporate, conservative, still haunted by 1963), and the vast rural expanse. Wright attends legislative sessions, visits border communities, profiles politicians and artists and oil executives, and traces his own family’s Texas roots.
The portrait is neither celebration nor indictment: Wright sees Texas clearly — its cruelty, its generosity, its swagger, its shame — and insists on holding all of it at once. The state that produced Lyndon Johnson and Ted Cruz, Willie Nelson and the Alamo myth, NASA and climate denial, is not a paradox to be resolved but a reality to be understood.
Collecting God Save Texas
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2018): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$20
- Signed first edition: $25–$50