He was known in his lifetime for his outspoken liberal views against Texas state politics, and he carried out a long, personal war against what he saw as braggart Texans, religious prejudice, restraints on individual liberty, and the mechanized world's assault on the human spirit.

In 1906, Dobie enrolled in Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, where he was introduced to English poetry by a professor who urged him to become a writer.

[1][2][4][5] After graduating in 1910, Dobie worked briefly for newspapers in San Antonio and Galveston before gaining his first teaching job at a high school in Alpine in southwestern Texas.

In 1923, unable to get a promotion without a PhD, Dobie accepted a job at Oklahoma A&M College as chair of its English department.

[1][2][10] In 1929, Dobie published his first book, A Vaquero of the Brush Country,[4] which helped establish him as an authentic voice of Texas and southwestern culture.

[11] The book was the result of a collaboration between Dobie and Young, a former open-range vaquero who had fought against the encroachment of barbed wire on southwest Texas's rangelands.

Young had written Dobie for help in writing his autobiography, saying that he intended to use the profits from the book to build a hotel for cattlemen in San Antonio.

[12] Although Lawrence Clark Powell, an authority on western writing at the University of California, wrote in the preface to the 1957 edition, "it was unmistakably Dobie on every page, in every paragraph, sentence, and word",[13] in 1994 Young's heirs filed a petition with the U.S. District Court For the Western District Of Texas asserting that Young and Dobie coauthored the book.

The matter of A Vaquero of the Brush Country's authorship was ultimately resolved in this litigation between Young's descendants, Dobie's estate, and the University of Texas, holders of interests in the copyright.

[2] On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, a longtime political rival of Stevenson, awarded Dobie the Medal of Freedom.

It will be kept in its present more or less natural state and the ranch house will be kept in simple style, very much as it was when Frank Dobie occupied it.Two fellowships of six months each are awarded by a committee chosen by the presidents of UT-Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters.