Biografía

When he was fifteen, he tried to sneak into a sold-out Elvis Presley concert in San Antonio by climbing a tree and attempting to get into the auditorium through a second-floor window. It turned out to be a window in Presley's dressing room. Presley, who was then at the dawn of his career, was so charmed by Wittliff that he wrote a note on a napkin telling the security guards to let Wittliff and his buddies into the auditorium.

Perhaps his biggest claim to fame during his university days was the horseshoe-shaped bar he built in his room at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house. At night, he and his roommate would turn the room into a gambling den, where Wittliff won most of the poker games and sold cheap Scotch that he had poured into empty Chivas Regal bottles. Among the regular visitors to his gambling den, he says, was Frank Erwin, who was the fraternity's legal adviser and later became the chairman of UT's board of regents.

Bill Wittliff wrote one movie based on his mother's life as a telephone operator ( Raggedy Man, starring Sissy Spacek), another about the life of country musicians on the road ( Honeysuckle Rose, again starring Willie Nelson), and a third about a family nearly losing its farm ( Country, starring Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard).

Using poker winnings as seed money, Wittliff and Sally ran the Encino Press out of their Austin home. Although the company barely got by, its books, almost all of them about Texas, were well received. Wittliff used Encino as his calling card to meet the region's best writers, including Larry McMurtry, who agreed to let Encino publish a collection of his essays that became the highly praised In a Narrow Grave.

Bill Wittliff wrote the screenplay for Lonesome Dove and suddenly found himself on Hollywood's rarefied A-list, being offered eyeball-popping amounts of money to move to Los Angeles and work on movies or television series. Yet he refused to leave Texas.