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.Ī masterwork of memoir and narrative history, The Kings of Big Spring is an indelible portrait of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself. But beneath the Rolexes and Rolls Royce cars is a reality as dark as the crude itself. While drilling wells for Grady's oil company, they fly around on private jets and embrace the honky-tonk high life of Texas oilmen. Loud and flamboyant, with a penchant for floor-length fur coats, Grady pulls Bobby and his young wife into his glamorous orbit. Grady Cunningham, Bobby's friend, is one of the newly-minted kings of Big Spring. Drilling rigs rise like timber along the pastures, and poor men become millionaires overnight.

Boom chasers pour in from the busted factory towns in the north. But now Big Spring’s streets are flooded again with roughnecks, money, and sin. Twenty-six, and with a wife and three kids, Bobby had left his hometown to seek a life removed from the blowing dust and oil fields, and to find spiritual peace.

In the winter of 1981, when the author is seven years old, Bobby receives a call from an old friend with a simple question, “How'd you like to be a millionaire?” But for young Bobby Mealer, the author’s father, religion is only an agent for rebellion. After embracing Pentecostalism during the Great Depression, they rely heavily on their faith to steel them against hardship and despair. For the next two generations, the Mealers live on the margins of poverty, laboring in the cotton fields and on the drilling rigs that sprout along the flatland, weathering dust and wind, booms and busts, and tragedies that scatter them like tumbleweed. They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast fortunes are being made from its own reserves of oil. Beset by drought, the family loses their farm just as the dead pastures around them give way to one of the biggest oil booms in American history. In 1892, Bryan Mealer’s great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime WalkĪ saga of family, fortune, faith in Texas, where blood is bond and oil is king… 'Bryan Mealer has given us a brilliant, and brilliantly entertaining, portrayal of family, and a bursting-at-the-seams chunk of America in the bargain.” Bryan Burrough, New York Times bestselling author of The Big Rich and Barbarians at the Gate 'Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy.'

The Big Rich by Bryan Burrough