Ebook: My First Thirty Years

When published in 1925, My First Thirty Years was briefly hailed as one of the best coming-of-age memoirs of the era and “the first genuinely realistic picture of the Southern poor white trash.” Within the next several months, forces conspired to curtail the book’s distribution and the career of its promising but blunt and radically feminist author. Britain, where Beasley was living at the time, banned the book for its violent and disturbing material; most copies were destroyed by Scotland Yard or U.S. Customs. The few that made it to Texas were mostly yanked off shelves by the Texas Rangers, probably on the orders of prominent Texans maligned in her book. Then the author vanished. She was 35.

My First Thirty Years was Beasley’s only work, depicting a hardscrabble and intelligent frontier girl attempting, and often failing, to retain her dignity as she strives to overcome the hardships of her roots. Beasley’s voice is compelling, dark, and full of complex motives. Writing at the highest pitch of anger and with a tough-as-nails sense of survival, she pulls no punches while vividly recounting the impossible life she barely escaped. Much of the memoir is about young Gertrude’s attempt to come to grips with her own budding sexuality by repressing it, the only socially approved solution in that era, and her scarcely contained rage at the inhumanity of turn-of-the-century frontier life. Hers is the still-relevant story of a bold woman overcoming brutal circumstances in the search for a different way to live.

You couldn’t say these sorts of things a century ago. The autobiography was printed in Paris by the publisher of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, and suppressed on both sides of the Atlantic. Two years later, Beasley disappeared under dark circumstances, leaving behind nothing more than an extraordinary example of memoir writing.

Upon rediscovering My First Thirty Years 60 years later, famed Texas author Larry McMurtry writes that her memoir “is one of the finest Texas books of its era; in my view, the finest.”