Kings of Big Spring

A journalist chronicles his Texas family’s century-long saga of faith and fortune seeking in this acclaimed memoir: “a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy” (Bryan Burrough, author of Barbarians at the Gate).

In 1892, Bryan Mealer’s great-grandfather leaves Georgia to seek his fortune in the open country of Texas. But the family soon loses their farm to drought just as the region experiences one of the biggest oil booms in American history. They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast oil fortunes are being made.

For the next two generations, the Mealers labor in cotton fields and on drilling rigs, weathering booms and busts. During the Great Depression, they ward off despair by embracing Pentecostalism. But for young Bobby Mealer, the author’s father, the search for spiritual peace leads him to a rebellious move away from Big Spring.

Then in 1981, Bobby’s old friend Grady Cunningham entices him back home with the promise of millions. While drilling wells for Grady’s oil company, Bobby and his wife embrace the honky-tonk high life. But beneath the Rolexes and private jets is a reality as dark as the crude itself. As Bobby soon discovers, his return to Big Spring is a backslider’s journey into a spiritual wilderness, and one that could cost him his life.

A masterwork of memoir and narrative history, The Kings of Big Spring is an indelible portrait of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself. And in telling the story of four generations of his family, Mealer also tells the story of America came to be.