James Young Phillips was 25 years old when his first book, “The Inheritors,” was published in 1940. He chose to write under the pseudonym (a fake name meant to disguise someone’s real identity) Philip Atlee, which he used for the remainder of his literary career.
When “The Inheritors” first hit the shelves, many reviewers compared it to “The Great Gatsby,” written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, as Atlee’s story similarly followed characters who were from wealthy walks of life.
Atlee, though, encountered negative feedback relating to his depictions of Fort Worth—particularly in terms of how he described the cattle baron and oil tycoon heirs who ran the show in his fictional version of the city. Centered around Cavin Jarvis and George Jimble, “The Inheritors” paints a harsh picture of Fort Worth’s finest in the 1930s.
The two main characters are members of River Crew Country Club and seemingly have everything they could ever dream of having, but are “utterly without purpose” and often spend their time “drinking, grifting, and burning through their parents’ fortunes out of boredom and contempt.” Upon its release, Texas newspapers reviewed the book poorly or ignored it entirely. And in Fort Worth itself, a scandal ensued.
“Within weeks, the city’s wealthy elite — the same ‘dollar aristocracy’ [Phillips had] spent 300 pages dissecting — had reportedly bought up copies en masse to suppress it. The Fort Worth Public Library kept its copy under lock and key. Even Phillips’ own mother was said to have gone around town purchasing copies to limit the book’s reach. The novel vanished from circulation. The author’s literary career never fully recovered.”
Now, 85 years after it was first published, “The Inheritors” is getting a shot at redemption thanks to TCU Press, the imprint run by Texas Christian University. Atlee’s novel will be re-released on September 15, and preorders are available now through TCU Press’s website.
When announcing its decision to revive the book several decades after it was shunned by Texas society, TCU Press wrote in a statement that the re-release comes “at a moment when its central themes — inherited privilege, the moral bankruptcy of the ultra-rich, and the aimlessness of those born to wealth without purpose — feel less like period detail and more like a mirror.”
Local journalist and author E.R. Bills has written a new introduction to Atlee’s story after having spent several years researching the history of “The Inheritors” in the hopes of “restoring it to its rightful place in American literary conversation.”
TCU Press and E.R. Bills have long supported Atlee’s work
In July 2025, TCU Press published James Phillips’s autobiography, “No Fixed Abode,” under the author’s real name instead of his pseudonym Philip Atlee. It marked the first time the publication chose to provide a platform for the Fort Worth author. It has since collaborated with another local writer, E.R. Bills, to bring “The Inheritors” to an entirely new generation of readers.
Bills, for his part, has been advocating on the novel’s behalf for several years. He and TCU Press put together a presentation in 2024 detailing the myriad ways Atlee’s story provided a uniquely honest take on Fort Worth society. Bills said, “The first chapter begins with the main character George Bellamy Jimble III, the protagonist of the book, who was based on Phillips himself, waking with a hangover and sophomoric episodes of masculine debauchery promptly ensue.”
He added, “For the next two dozen chapters, they drink, chase girls, pursue a questionable easy money grift for liquor money and express profoundly dim views of country club gaiety and undermine the entire Cowtown dollar aristocracy.”
It was ultimately Atlee’s descriptions of this aristocracy that led him to being ostracized by the very people he was writing about. In one part of “The Inheritors,” Atlee writes of country club members, “Maybe they ought to lock the people up in the bank vault and let the money do the living.”
Bills himself said, “That’s pretty harsh,” but he doesn’t necessarily think it was unwarranted for Atlee to be candid about what life was really like back then. Particularly when you consider how the author lived close to River Crest Country Club and was personally familiar with several privileged families who worked in the ranching and oil industries.
Will the novel’s re-release draw as many negative reactions as it did in 1940? Only time will tell.
This article first appeared on Good Info News Wire and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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