Books by Charles Francis Guittard
Scribblings from Storage
THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH MAJOR
Whether he's sun-lamping to improve his skin or studying The Art of Dating to prepare for when a girl answers the phone, Charles's story is hilariously specific—and surprisingly universal.”
Scribblings from Storage: The Confessions of an English Major (2025): Told through the artifacts of his so-called permanent record, this unconventional memoir traces Charles’ winding journey as an earnest but often insecure teenager stumbling reluctantly toward adulthood.
Dating dramas, debate, bridge, and ping-pong competitions, college decisions, fraternity rushes, career anxiety, and spiritual curiosity all collide as he tries to figure out who he is and what on earth he’s meant to do.
A collage of cartoons, clippings, photos, essays, and lots of letters is held together by the author’s humorously self-deprecating and frank, at times raw, reflections throughout.
Thinking Things Over
THE REFLECTIONS OF TWO 80-YEAR-OLDS
“A rollicking good read and a view into the minds of a gifted writing team.”
Thinking Things Over, The Reflections of Two 80-Year-Olds (2024): What can happen when an 80-year-old Dallas widower meets an 80-year-old Austin widow?
Several things, one right after another. Front and center is their courtship itself, told through their emails, combined with their separate accounts of growing up.
Charles details his parents’ attempts to polish him and wise him up about sex. Nancy separately chronicles her efforts competing in tennis, swimming, and singing; relationships that went nowhere; days as a civil rights protester; moments as a college prankster; slow-dancing with a boy wearing contact lenses; and the family dog who ate chicken.
I Will Teach History
THE LIFE & TIMES OF FRANCIS GEVIER GUITTARD
“A fascinating family story reaching from generation to generation with wisdom and charm.”
I Will Teach History, The Life & Times of Francis Gevrier Guittard, Professor, Baylor University (2021): The third volume of the trilogy about the legendary Professor and his times told conversationally in dialogues with the author’s grandchildren.
IWTH covers both his public side as a teacher and his private side as a husband and father who had moments of great joy and achievement, along with those of deep personal grief and devastation, and concludes with his late-life lonely struggle to earn a Ph.D. Significant moments in Baylor's history contextualize Frank’s life both as a Baylor student in the 1890s and as a professor of history.
Notably, the reverie tells a story of change at the turn of the century from debates on evolution, progressive ideals, and the ominous resurgence of a resurrected Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.
A Ph.D.’s Reverie: The Letters
“eminently enjoyable;” “illuminating and entertaining;” “masterful, intertwined portrait”
A Ph.D.’s Reverie: The Letters (2019): Family correspondence between Francis Gevrier Guittard and his family members, including his first and second wives and his two sons, and largely focusing on the years he earned his Ph.D. in late life at Stanford as the oldest student in the room.
President Samuel P. Brooks had strongly advised him to go back to school and earn his doctorate. So now, at age fifty-six, Frank was sweating blood at Stanford and occasionally wondering why he had agreed to take on what turned out to be his personal Everest.
At the same time, Brooks, who was not well, had his own ultimate challenge--defending against an unrelenting fundamentalist archenemy intent on exposing alleged evolutionists on Baylor’s faculty. To protect academic freedom at Baylor, Brooks was required to adopt increasingly aggressive strategies.
A Ph.D.’s Reverie
“Haunting at times...I felt the struggles and pain Frank must have felt.”
A Ph.D.'s Reverie (2018): A biographical poem with historical notes focusing on vignettes from the life of Francis Gevrier Guittard (1867-1950) with illustrations by Grace Daniel, a Baylor art student. The work presents a series of imagined vignettes poetically rendered from the story of Frank Guittard, a game young scholar of limited means who, encouraged by his parents to leave home for Texas during hard times, struggles to achieve his central goal of a college education.
The reverie passes through a number of his feelings, including homesickness and isolation, fear and anxiety, as well as destiny, adventure, excitement, and challenge, and finally elation and satisfaction from having earned a Ph.D. at Stanford and the expectation of going home to family.
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