Literary Austin: A City of Writers

Long before it called itself a music capital, Austin was a town of writers — a place where a bank clerk named William Sydney Porter dreamed up the pen name O. Henry, where a folklorist made "Mr. Texas" a job title, and where one of the world's great literary archives quietly holds a Gutenberg Bible a few blocks from the Capitol. This driving tour threads the city's bookish landmarks: the downtown cottage where O. Henry lived, the old federal courthouse that bears his name, a Brush Square neighbor who became the Alamo's storyteller, Texas's flagship independent bookstore, the Capitol lawn that hosts a nationally known book festival, the humanities library that guards literary treasures on the UT campus, and the home of the writer who did more than anyone to put Texas letters on the map. It's a portrait of Austin as a city that has always taken its stories seriously.