Steven L. Davis is the author of two highly praised books on Texas, and his work has appeared in several magazines and journals. Davis is a curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, which holds the literary papers of Cormac McCarthy and many other writers. He lives in New Braunfels, Texas.

Months before Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy 50 years ago this November, he tried to kill someone else: General Edwin Walker, an ultra-right winger who was arrested for sedition on Kennedy’s orders. In an excerpt from their new book, Dallas 1963, the story of Walker’s anti-civil rights tour through the south and Oswald’s personal collapse that led to their almost fatal encounter.