"... By the time he arrived at UT-Austin for graduate school, after college at Texas Christian University, Hickey had an air of sophistication. He was named editor of the campus literary magazine and then became a columnist for the Texas Observer. He played wry folk songs at parties and quoted Susan Sontag and Gilles Deleuze. People talked about him. “He had this reputation that flew around that he used to run with Larry McMurtry and those guys and that he had been as good as McMurtry, and maybe better,” says Brian Dippie, a cultural historian who was a UT graduate student in American civilization at the time. “In person he was such a serious, intense conversationalist. You always felt like he would see through you.” Max Gimblett, a painter who showed at Hickey’s gallery, remembers him as “one of the most intelligent people I’d ever known. Free of a whole lot of bullshit about art. Free of other people’s opinions ..."