He was born in 1888 on the Dobie ranch in Live Oak County in the Texas brush country near the border. Several of his uncles were Texas Rangers and his grandfathers were both Texas cattlemen. He attended Southwestern University in Georgetown, where he grew to love English poetry and met his bride to be, Bertha McKee, also class of 1910. He taught high school in Alpine and worked as a reporter in the summer in San Antonio and Galveston. He received the M. A. in English at Columbia in 1914 and took a position in the English department at the University of Texas in 1914. In 1916 he married his college sweet heart, who also taught English at the University of Texas. . In 1917 he was commissioned first lieutenant in the Field Artillery unit at Leon springs, near San Antonio. After the war he returned to U. T., though he took time out in 1920 to run his Uncle Jim's ranch (256,000 acres). In 1922 he became editor of the Texas Folklore Society, a post he held until 1942. His Legends of Texas was published in 1924 and he became Chair of the English Department at Oklahoma State in Stillwater from 1923-1925. Then he returned to Austin for good. In 1930 he began teaching his famous course "Life and Literature of the Southwest." He taught in 17 times, to a total of 1596 students. It was "the most popular elective ever taught at the University" (34). He had many academic honors, including an appointment at Cambridge University as visiting professor of history. There he was awarded another M.A. degree, the citation of which reads in part, "De bobus longicocornibus quod ille non cognivit, inutile est allis cognoscere" ("What he does not know about longhorns is not worth knowing").

In the 1940's the Regents began to interfere directly in the affairs of the University, dropping John Dos Passos' The Big Money from a required reading list, firing three economics professors they did not like, and trying to abolish tenure. Students marched on the Capitol carrying the coffin of "Academic Freedom." Dobie protested, when they fired the president of the University, Homer Rainey, in 1944, when they tried to censor the Daily Texan, etc. He was always on the side of the students. Dobie was denounced in the Texas Senate for supporting integration as well. Governor Stevenson said Dobie was a trouble maker who should be fired. The Regents removed his name from the budget in 1947 and denied him the status of professor emeritus. Students led a procession to his house chanting "We want Dobie!" and he "acknowledged their thanks for his service over 33 years" (119). He died in 1964.

His love of the land was intense. The "plot of earth" where he was born, he said, "has said more to me than any person I have known, or any writer I have read, though only through association with fine minds and spirits have I come to realize its sayings" (13). He added that "Wordsworth has given me more about Nature than any other writer" (13).

Chancellor Ransom said of him, "I think Frank Dobie was one of the greatest teachers the University of Texas ever had, but like very great teacher he could never have been typed. For example, he wasn't and he didn't claim to be technically a folklorist. What he certainly was, and never claimed to be, was one of the truly great natural historians in the tradition of the Greeks, the medievalists, Renaissance men, the eighteenth-century English naturalist Gilbert white, and W. H. Hudson. And this insight into nature, I think, needs to be continued as a Dobie tradition here if the University is really going to realize its own promise" (27-8).

Winston Bode, A Portrait of Pancho: The Life of a Great Texan, J. Frank Dobie (Austin: Pemberton P, 1965)

Mody Boatright, "A Mustang in the Groves of Academe," In Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie, ed. Ronnie Dugger (UT Press, 1967).