Virtually unknown today, Perry was one of Texas’ most celebrated authors in the 1940s and 50s.

Born in Rockdale in 1910, Perry attended several colleges, but never graduated. Instead, he moved back to his hometown and pushed through the Great Depression with a small inheritance and a determination to write about the rural and small-town life around him. He married the love of his life, Claire Hodges, on the 20th of February 1933 in her hometown of Beaumont, Texas. They would remain devoted to each other until his death, and had no children.

Publication in the Saturday Evening Post came in 1937, then a book deal. In 1941 came his masterwork, “Hold Autumn in Your Hand” — one of America’s most celebrated agrarian novels oft compared to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It won the Texas Institute of Letters award that year, became the first Texas book to win the National Book Award the next, and was made into a movie called The Southerner by famed French director Jean Renoir. It was to be his only novel.

Perry served as a war correspondent during World War II and so traumatized by the horrors he witnessed that he said it “defictionized” him for life. His subsequent work, no longer light-hearted, concentrated on nonfiction, including “My Granny Van” — about the maternal grandmother who raised him when he was orphaned at the age of 12 — and a history of Texas A&M University. Perry became a celebrated and well-paid magazine writer by the late 1940s.

Wracked by depression, hallucinations, acute arthritis and a drinking problem, in winter 1956 he walked out of his Connecticut home and into a nearby river; his body was found months later.