Robert Trammell is an avatar of the Dallas underground. In the introduction to Deep Vellum’s new trade paperback edition of Trammell’s Jack Ruby & The Origins of the Avant-Garde in Dallas and Other Stories (the title novella was first issued in 1987 as essentially self-published samizdat via Trammell’s own Barnburner Press), National Book Award-winner Ben Fountain reveals Trammell as a 1960s wild man inhabiting the 1980s, a sort of Texan Bukowski-Hopper hybrid who at one point squatted in Oslo, Norway, and earlier, while a student at Southern Methodist University, was nearly run down by ultraconservative billionaire and propaganda-meister H.L. Hunt. Trammell spent time in a violent prison for possession of a tiny amount of marijuana, then later served as a fellow at The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. His 2006 obituary (he died fittingly in Old East Dallas) in The Dallas Morning News dubs him a “beloved Texas poet whose ancestors helped establish the earliest frontier settlements in East Texas” and whose “work appeared in over 200 magazines including Southwest Review, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, and The Texas Observer. Bob spoke his mind whatever the situation and cut a wide and irreverent swath wherever he went.