lit a candle 4h ago75. That's it, that's the whole sentence that stops me. Read The Train to Crystal City on a plane a few years back and haven't looked at that part of WWII history the same way since. Thinking of her family tonight.
Their story
Jan Jarboe Russell was an American journalist and nonfiction author whose reporting and books explored Texas politics, culture, and overlooked chapters of United States history. She died on 29 September 2026 at the age of 75. Texas Monthly, where she had long been a staff writer and contributing editor, remembered…
Jan Jarboe Russell was an American journalist and nonfiction author whose reporting and books explored Texas politics, culture, and overlooked chapters of United States history. She died on 29 September 2026 at the age of 75. Texas Monthly, where she had long been a staff writer and contributing editor, remembered her as a widely admired colleague and friend. A memorial essay by Mimi Swartz, published on 30 September 2026, described her later struggle with Alzheimer's disease.
Born on 14 January 1951 in Beaumont, Texas, she grew up in the East Texas town of Cleveland, where her father was a minister of music. The complexities of that Baptist East Texas upbringing stayed with her as a writer. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1972 after working on The Daily Texan. She then became a political reporter for the San Antonio Light and later a political columnist for the San Antonio Express-News. San Antonio became her lasting home, a city she loved for its openness after a stricter childhood.
She joined Texas Monthly in the 1980s and wrote for the magazine for thirteen years. Notable pieces included a 1988 investigation of corrupt adoption practices and a 1991 profile of oilman Oscar Wyatt that colleagues still cited as a classic Texas portrait. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1984. After leaving the magazine staff she published books including Cisneros: Portrait of a New American (1985), Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson (named by The Washington Post among the year's best), and The Train to Crystal City (2015), a New York Times bestseller about a World War II family internment camp in Texas and a secret prisoner exchange programme. Her last book, Eleanor in the Village, examined Eleanor Roosevelt's Greenwich Village life and was finished with great effort as her illness advanced.
Russell belonged to the Texas Institute of Letters and the Philosophical Society of Texas, received Gemini Ink's Award for Literary Excellence in 2018, and was inducted into the Daily Texan Hall of Fame. She is survived by her husband Lucky Russell and her children Maury and Tyler. Friends remembered her loyalty and curiosity as carefully as her prose, placing her among Texas women writers who combined toughness with warmth.
Biography adapted from English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); Texas Monthly (Mimi Swartz, 30 September 2026); San Antonio Express-News; University of Texas and Texas Institute of Letters notices as reported. Wikipedia ↗
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