A terrible thing has recently happened to me. I have become obsessed with the golden era of American magazines. This grave affliction manifests itself in several symptoms. First, it causes one’s reading list to grow to enormous length. Just when you think you’ve discovered the last memoir about answering phones at the midcentury New Yorker, or cowering under the thumb of Anna Wintour at Vogue, or of late nights at Partisan Review in the hard-drinking glory days, or at the in the high-flying Sixties, several more rear their heads, like martini-soaked Whack-a-Moles. And because the whole thing involves the settling of long-simmering scores and the clashing of titanic egos, you’re almost obligated to read everything in order to form a full picture of the personalities involved. Was the New Yorker’s William Shawn a gnomic sage, or a doddering fool? Did Tina Brown destroy high-middlebrow literary culture in America, or save it? The same person might be painted as a saint in one memoir and a tyrant in the next, and the same incidents might recur across different books with totally different causes and effects, so hell, you might as well read them all.

Lubbock, Texas is almost exactly five hours from Dallas, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and El Paso. It’s home to Texas Tech University, the National Cowboy Symposium, and frequent dust storms and tornadoes. In 1951, the still-unexplained “Lubbock Lights” sightings helped to kick off the UFO craze. In 1988, 12,000 pilgrims came to Lubbock to witness an alleged apparition of Mary. In between these two phenomena, a young man named Terry Allen left Lubbock for California. He wanted to become an artist, but he wound up becoming something more. Allen is perhaps the only person in history to achieve equal acclaim in the fields of conceptual art and country music. His work hangs in major museums and his public installations can be seen livening up the staid financial districts of major cities, while his weird, warped, and warm brand of outlaw country, to his devoted cult, stands shoulder to shoulder with Willie, Townes, and the rest. Brendan Greaves, who through his offbeat, literate “American vernacular” record label Paradise of Bachelors helped to rescue Allen’s music from defunct-label oblivion, spent five years talking to Allen, his friends, and his collaborators to produce Truckload of Art, the first major biography of him and his work. For anyone with an interest in any of the things I mentioned above, it’s essential reading: as a record of a truly underappreciated American artist, a narrative of a biographer coming to know his subject, and an exploration of the perils and joys of a creative life.