lonesome dove book review new york times

September 10, 1995 'Lonsome Dove': The Prequel By THOMAS FLANAGAN DEAD MAN'S WALK By Larry McMurtry. n the opening paragraph of Larry McMurtry's "Dead Man's Walk," a whore named Matilda Jane Roberts, known throughout south Texas as the Great Western, walks, "naked as the air," up from the muddy Rio Grande and into an encampment of Texas Rangers, holding a snapping turtle by the tail. As Mr. McMurtry credibly reports, "the sight of a naked, 200-pound whore carrying a full-grown snapping turtle" captures the complete attention of the troop. But it must be merely the piquant conjunction of whore and turtle that attracts them. Save perhaps for a few youngsters who have lied about their ages, everyone in the troop has seen Matilda naked more times than he can count. "Dead Man's Walk" is plumb chockablock with whores and turtles. The whores are used by the Rangers, and anybody else who can cough up six bits, with the remote, casual confidence one might feel toward a seasoned and reliable saddle. Turtles are a different matter -- fit food perhaps for slaves and savages, but edible by white men only as a last, stomach-heaving remedy for starvation. Needless to say, especially to readers of "Lonesome Dove" (1985), they are soon driven to that extreme. When it comes to contriving tests of manhood, Mr. McMurtry knows no master. "Lonesome Dove," set in a more or less civilized post-Civil War West, had as its center an epic cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, captained by two grizzled former Rangers named Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae, described by the publishers of "Dead Man's Walk" as "beloved," although for my part I would rather belove a snapping turtle. The modern world was closing in on Call and McCrae. They told themselves that they were turning cattlemen to make money, but of course they were trying to outrun modernity, to move back to a springtime world of tests of manhood. For a part of their trek, they were accompanied by a specific test of manhood -- a whore with the requisite largeness of spirit and frame. She shared with them and most of the cowboys that gift for dry, laconic understatement that seems necessary for survival, if not in Texas, then surely on Mr. McMurtry's pages. His characters savor their own taciturnity, valuing it as an expression of virtue in a world where Gary Cooper would have been called gabby. "Dead Man's Walk" is that novel's prequel, as such things are called -- set in the days of the independent Republic of Texas, with McCrae and Call still in their early 20's. It is a stranger and a more ambitious book than its predecessor, ruthless in its disposition of characters, sparse and vivid in its creation of the inhuman landscapes of New Mexico and the plains. Not that "Lonesome Dove" was not strange in some similar ways. Just about all the women were whores, never referred to in other terms. A few exceptions existed, but mostly for the purpose of being slaughtered by nonwhite malignants like Blue Duck, who tortured and killed out of pure cussedness. In the final pages, Blue Duck was captured and sentenced to die, at which point something happened that was the Texas equivalent of magic realism. Call went into Blue Duck's cell to look at him, and there he was, looking all baleful and bad, like Victor Jory in the 1930's film of "Tom Sawyer." He told Call that he could fly. And damned if he couldn't: a bit later, as Call stood watching outside the courthouse, he saw Blue Duck hurling himself out the window, carrying a jailer with him. "He looked up and the hair on his neck rose, for Blue Duck was flying through the air in his chains." In the line of fathomless cruelty, though, Blue Duck is an effete dandy compared with Buffalo Hump, the Comanche chief in "Dead Man's Walk," or Gomez, the gruesome, merciless Apache. Some of the whites are awful too -- Caleb Cobb, for example, an ex-pirate and self-appointed colonel who takes the Rangers on the goofy expedition to Santa Fe that supplies the novel with its plot. Chiefly, however, the book is held together by various tests of manhood, culminating in a 200-mile forced march across New Mexico's dread Jornada del Muerto, the dead man's walk. Cobb has various limitations of character and is accorded only a mild sympathy when the Comanches hamstring him and punch out his eyes with thorns. Even worse is Major Laroche, a Frenchman serving in the Mexican Army, given to twisting his curled and waxed mustaches, his thoughts doubtless on turtle soup. But they just aren't in the running. For a cruelty that is truly fathomless, one needs Comanches or Apaches, although in a pinch the unspeakable Kiowas will do. "Lonesome Dove" and "Dead Man's Walk" are linked by the elements out of which Mr. McMurtry has created their world: an intense if unstated male bonding forged through suffering and an appetite for experience, a world of women who have passed into the sisterhood of whoredom, horizons of bleak and aching beauty and intimations of a transcendence that reveals itself in strange shapes -- like Blue Duck in his chains, sailing through the Texas sky. IN "Dead Man's Walk," the transcendence is more bizarre. Call, McCrae and three other surviving Rangers have been consigned to a leper colony near El Paso by the diabolical Major Laroche. They are rescued by an English aristocrat, Lady Carey, ravaged by leprosy but exquisite of manner and speech and gifted with a haunting soprano voice. The Rangers -- and Matilda, the Great Western, who has strung along with them -- are not quite sure how to behave in front of Lady Carey, and I don't think I would know how either. Suddenly one has passed into a blue-lighted grotto of Gothic theatricalities and lofty thought. The shift of modalities is stunning, but not persuasive. On the novel's closing page, Matilda and the Rangers are standing on the pier at Galveston, and McCrae has never felt happier. He is safe, Mr. McMurtry says, "and the port of Galveston virtually teemed with whores. He had already visited five." Matilda, fortunately, is not the jealous type, and she must be bone-weary after the Jornada del Muerto, the leper colony and yet another Comanche attack led by the indefatigable Buffalo Hump. "I guess this is where I quit the rangering, boys," Long Bill Coleman, one of Call and McCrae's sidekicks, says. "It's rare sport, but it ain't quite safe." This should surely earn him the Walter Brennan Award for Most Laconic Understatement by a Supporting Character. And Mr. McMurtry's two novels, freestanding and yet linked, should surely earn an award of some kind, for carrying forward to their ultimate limit the themes and leather-tough atmospherics on which novels and films of the Texas frontier depend. Perhaps they should be called the Great Western. Return to the Books Home Page

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By Rachel Monroe

As a boy, Larry McMurtry rode Polecat, a Shetland pony with a mean streak and a habit of dragging him through mesquite thickets. The family ranch occupied a hard, dry, largely featureless corner of north-central Texas, and was perched on a rise known as Idiot Ridge. McMurtry’s three siblings appeared better adapted to their environment—one of his sisters was named rodeo queen; his brother cowboyed for a while—but Larry, the eldest, was afraid of shrubbery, and of poultry. His father, Jeff Mac, ran hundreds of cows, which he knew individually, by their markings; Larry’s eyesight was so poor that he had a hard time spotting a herd on the horizon. When his cowboy uncles were young, they sat on the roof of a barn and watched the last cattle drives set out on the long trek north. McMurtry lay under the ranch-house roof and listened to the hum of the highway, as eighteen-wheelers headed toward Fort Worth, Dallas, or beyond—anywhere bigger, and far away. Many years later, the London-born Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, a rodeo enthusiast, wore a Stetson and a bolo tie to his first meeting with McMurtry. He was surprised, and perhaps a bit disappointed, to find the young writer dressed “like a graduate student,” in slacks and a sports coat. “He did not share my enthusiasm for horses, either,” Korda recalled.

The mismatch between a glamorized West and the grimmer, starker reality was McMurtry’s great subject across the dozens of novels, nonfiction books, and screenplays that he wrote or co-wrote before his death, at eighty-four, in 2021, from congestive heart failure. In “Larry McMurtry: A Life,” a new biography by Tracy Daugherty, the author of well-received books about Joseph Heller, Joan Didion, and Donald Barthelme, McMurtry emerges as a perpetually ambivalent figure, one who eventually became a part of the mythology that he insisted he was attempting to dismantle.

Although McMurtry spent decades living in Washington, D.C., and Tucson, and wrote books set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, he was always conscious of himself as a Texas writer. It was an identity imposed from both without and within; some part of McMurtry always remained stuck on Idiot Ridge, looking out toward the horizon. In his early thirties, with a handful of novels to his name, he published an essay condemning the state of Texas letters as woefully backward. More than a decade later, he wrote another, even harsher assessment, claiming that “Texas has produced no major writers or major books.” But even McMurtry’s repudiations have a funny way of reaffirming Texas chauvinism. (“One must ask: What has Nevada done for literature lately? Who’s the Alaskan Tennyson?” Barthelme wrote, for Texas Monthly , in an archly mocking response to McMurtry’s later essay. “We’ve done at least as well as Rhode Island, we’re pushing Wyoming to the wall.”) With “Lonesome Dove,” the best-selling cattle-drive epic that won him a Pulitzer in 1986, McMurtry believed that he had written a book “permeated with criticism of the West from start to finish.” Instead, it reinvigorated the Western as a genre. Daugherty quotes the late Don Graham, who was a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin: “ ‘The Godfather’ was supposed to de-mythologize the mob, too, but we all wanted to be gangsters after we saw it, right?”

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McMurtry was born in 1936, into a way of life that was already on its way out. Small-scale cattle ranching was a dying industry, one that McMurtry missed out on “only by the width of a generation,” he wrote, and “as I was growing up, heard the whistle of its departure.” His father was a stoic man who thought that ice water was an indulgence; his mother, Hazel, was cripplingly fearful. The family was in thrall to Jeff Mac’s parents—among the first white people to settle in Archer County—who seemed to expect subsequent generations to double down on their sacrifice. From a young age, McMurtry sensed that this was a bad bargain. His uncles lived in broken bodies, sustaining themselves on remembered, or imagined, glory days—they were brilliant storytellers but also cautionary tales. Drought, urbanization, and oil were reshaping the Texas economy. Corporate operations were squeezing out small farms, and cowboys were moving to the suburbs. But being a McMurtry meant sticking with an enterprise long after it made sense. One uncle, debilitated by age and hard living, took to tying himself to his horse with baling wire—a “lunatic thing to do considering the roughness of the country and the temperament of most of the horses he rode,” McMurtry wrote. Any mourning for a lost era was tempered by McMurtry’s understanding that the good old days were never that good to begin with. His characters are often uneasy in the present moment, filled with a longing for something that they can’t quite name.

When McMurtry was a second grader, the family moved to Archer City, a one-stoplight town about eighteen miles from the ranch. In high school, he was an officer in the 4-H club, a trombone player in the band, and the third-tallest member of a basketball team that once lost a game 106–4. Even though he grew up in a largely bookless town, “reading very quickly came to seem what I was meant to do,” McMurtry wrote. The few books that he got his hands on assumed an almost totemic importance: Grosset & Dunlap pulps, inherited from a cousin going off to war; a truck-flattened history of the Creeks, found in the parking lot of a livestock auction. “I shall almost certainly make some weird combination of writer-rancher-professor out of myself,” he wrote in his application essay to North Texas State. He wasn’t yet twenty-one years old and had already amassed a library of six hundred volumes. (McMurtry’s collecting was not a purely intellectual enterprise; he eventually amassed enough vintage pornography to fill a small room.)

As a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, McMurtry supplemented his stipend by buying and selling used books; meanwhile, his friend and classmate Ken Kesey made extra money being dosed with LSD for scientific experiments. The sixties were kicking up, and McMurtry toggled between working on an anonymous radical publication and writing stories about stolid, repressed cattle ranchers. The youth culture in evidence in his early novels is distinctly Texan and rural (and white): Cadillacs and roughnecks, Hank Williams songs on the jukebox at the pool hall, aimless drives down empty streets. In McMurtry’s depictions of small-town America in the fifties, there’s little to be nostalgic for, apart from the jukeboxes—life is cramped and strangled, suffused with boredom that threatens to tip into menace. Violent impulses are enacted on women, animals, and weaker boys. In “The Last Picture Show,” from 1966, teen-agers gleefully rape a “skinny, quivering” blind heifer whose “frightened breath raised little puffs of dust from the sandy lot.” “To Mom and Daddy,” McMurtry wrote in a copy of the novel he sent to his parents. “You probably won’t like it. Love, Larry.”

McMurtry’s novels translated well to the movies, where the sweep of the settings helped to mute the stories’ cynicism. His first novel, “Horseman, Pass By” became “Hud,” starring a callous, smoldering Paul Newman; “The Last Picture Show,” according to Daugherty, sold nine hundred copies in hardcover upon its initial printing, but Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film became an immediate sensation, winning two Oscars. (The heifer-rape scene did not make it into the movie.) McMurtry’s home town was already wary of him, and the scandal-plagued filming of “The Last Picture Show” didn’t improve his local reputation. (Bogdanovich’s marriage to his wife and collaborator, Polly Platt, collapsed after he began an on-set affair with the film’s twenty-year-old star, Cybill Shepherd.) The Archer County News ran an angry letter about “the further degradation and decay of the morals and attitudes we foist upon our youth in this county”; according to Daugherty, McMurtry, incensed by such attacks, responded by challenging his fellow-citizens to a public debate about the town’s true nature. Around that time, he decided that the future of Texas, and Texas writing, was urban, and he went on to write a suite of novels featuring graduate students, entertaining but uneven books that swing from slapstick to pathos. McMurtry was particularly good at capturing the charms of Houston—steamy, dank, violent, fun.

When Daugherty told the art critic Dave Hickey that he was writing a book about McMurtry, Hickey replied, “Knowing Larry, it’s going to be a real episodic book.” McMurtry was an inveterate road tripper who collected friends like he collected books, and Daugherty’s biography is full of entertaining cameos: McMurtry hosts Kesey’s bus of zonked-out Merry Pranksters, dines on caviar with Susan Sontag, goes flea-market shopping with Diane Keaton, and attends a state dinner for Prince Charles and Princess Diana hosted by Ronald Reagan. But the anecdotes, many of them drawn from McMurtry’s own writing about his life, can feel like a shield. A deeper sense of McMurtry remains elusive throughout the biography; he comes across as a hard man to get to know well. (In “Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry,” edited by the writer George Getschow, the difficulty of approaching and engaging with McMurtry is a recurrent theme.)

McMurtry was often lauded for his skill at writing female characters, which seems to boil down to the simple fact that he found women interesting, and not merely in terms of their relationships with men. In McMurtry’s books, characters who don’t get what they want tend to have the richest interiority. His female characters, less able to force their environments to conform to their egos, tend to see the world more clearly. In “Terms of Endearment,” men are either underwhelming or comic. The novel is more interested in relationships among a constellation of women: Emma Horton, a young mother with unrealized literary ambitions; her friend Patsy; her vexing, charismatic mother, Aurora; and Aurora’s put-upon housekeeper, Rosie. When Emma is dying, Aurora and Patsy circle her hospital bed, discussing her children’s futures. Flap, Emma’s husband, “was there too,” but “he was not relevant.”

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McMurtry once wrote that the women he knew growing up had responded to men’s carelessness and indifference by retreating into a “mulish, resigned silence,” which he likened to “the muteness of an empty skillet, without resonance and without depth.” He emerged from this stifled environment with a real fondness for listening to women talk. After an early marriage and divorce, he embarked on a series of long-running, overlapping, ambiguously intimate friendships with a number of women, including Keaton and the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko; he managed to come away from the filming of “The Last Picture Show” close to both Platt and Shepherd. McMurtry spoke with his female friends regularly on the phone, wrote them letters, brought them flowers, and slept with some of them. Having raised his son, James, more or less on his own, he seemed to have an appreciation for single mothers. “He was, physically, one of the least attractive men imaginable, but as a friend he was everything I wanted,” Shepherd wrote in her memoir. “A renaissance cowboy, an earthy intellectual, a Pulitzer Prize winner who could take pleasure in a dive that served two-dollar tacos.”

Even as McMurtry urged other Texas writers to root their stories in the present, and in cities—“Why are there still cows to be milked and chickens to be fed in every other Texas book that comes along? When is enough going to be enough?”—he was working on his nineteenth-century cattle-drive epic. “Lonesome Dove” originated as an idea for a screenplay, tossed around by Bogdanovich and McMurtry after the success of “The Last Picture Show.” The plan was to cast John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda in a story about aging cowboys. “I said it needed to be a trek: They start somewhere, they go somewhere,” Bogdanovich recalled, years later. “He said we might as well start at the Rio Grande and go north.” One of the characters would be called Augustus, they decided, because they enjoyed imagining how Stewart would pronounce the name. The film never worked out; according to McMurtry, Stewart and Fonda weren’t keen on their last cowboy movie being “a dim moral victory.”

A decade later, McMurtry repurposed the material into a novel about a group of men, led by the ex-Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, who become the first people to drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana. The cattle drive proved to be an ideal subject for McMurtry. Though he never seemed much interested in plot architecture, he was an excellent writer of episodes; along the trail, the Hat Creek outfit is beset by locusts, bandits, and all manner of weather. Years earlier, McMurtry’s novel “All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers” had portrayed a pair of Texas Rangers as violent buffoons. In “Lonesome Dove,” Call and McCrae are essentially noble, if emotionally stunted.

Despite McMurtry’s evident affection for the characters, there’s a pervasive sense of something sour about their quest. In the novel’s first major set piece, the crew carries out a nighttime raid across the Rio Grande into Mexico to steal a herd of horses to take on the northward journey. “Evidently, if you crossed the river to do it, it stopped being a crime and became a game,” a teen-age apprentice learns; the more seasoned hands accept the robbery as a matter of course. This initial crime echoes a more shameful and consequential theft that reverberates throughout the novel: white settlers’ expropriation of the Great Plains and the attempted eradication of their Indigenous inhabitants. The novel is haunted by the aftereffects of those actions: a small band of starving Native Americans, slaughtering horses for food; an old man with a dirty beard pushing a wheelbarrow of buffalo bones across the high plains. Viewed from the ground, the cattle drive is thrilling, but seen from any greater distance it’s devastating. McCrae, the novel’s romantic cynic, periodically lays bare what all the episodic heroism has been for: “That’s what we done, you know. Kilt the dern Indians so they wouldn’t bother the bankers.” McMurtry well knew the ecological devastation wrought by the expansion of the cattle industry, and the fact that it contained the seeds of its own collapse. Overgrazing degraded the rangelands, and mesquite and creosote bushes crowded out native grasses. Just a few generations after the events of “Lonesome Dove,” McMurtry’s father was embroiled in an endless, futile war to eradicate mesquite from his ranch. “We killed the right animal, the buffalo, and brought in the wrong animal, wetland cattle. And it didn’t work,” McMurtry said in 2010.

“Lonesome Dove” is a deeply ambivalent book, though, to McMurtry’s chagrin, it wasn’t always recognized as such. Adapted into a beloved 1989 miniseries, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as McCrae and Call, it further established the ex-Rangers as sentimental heroes. McMurtry began comparing his most popular book to “Gone with the Wind”; he didn’t mean it as a compliment. Still, he went on to write sequels and prequels, spinning out an extended universe that was, on the whole, more rote and less complex than the original.

For all his mixed feelings about “Lonesome Dove,” McMurtry appreciated the rewards that the book and other projects brought him. “Movie money is just the kind of unreal money I like to spend,” he once wrote to his agent. On road trips, in rented Cadillacs, he sent his dirty clothes home via FedEx; he became such a regular at Petrossian, the caviar spot in midtown Manhattan, that the restaurant installed a brass plaque with his name at his favorite table. But his biggest indulgence was books. As independent bookstores across the country closed, McMurtry bought up their stock and moved it to Archer City, where he was busy converting downtown buildings into bookstores. “Leaving a million or so in Archer City is as good a legacy as I can think of for that region and indeed for the West,” McMurtry wrote. The town, having endured a major oil bust, was at last ready to embrace its wayward son. Visitors to Archer City could now stay at the Lonesome Dove Inn and pay their respects to a small McMurtry shrine at the Dairy Queen. When Sontag came to visit, she told McMurtry that it seemed as though he was living inside his own theme park.

The final third of Daugherty’s book makes for bleak reading. McMurtry had a heart attack in 1991, and quadruple-bypass surgery left him feeling “largely posthumous,” as he put it, a condition from which he seems to have never fully recovered. His closest partnership around this time was with Diana Ossana, a Tucson paralegal. Daugherty is never quite able to explain the nature of their relationship—was she his girlfriend, his friend, his writing partner, his manager, or some combination of all four? Whatever their dynamic, Ossana was a key source of support. During the worst of his post-surgery years, a period when McMurtry was suffering from depression, he lived with her. For a while, he still approached writing as if it were farm chores, something to be tackled first thing in the morning, seven days a week, without fail. But after the publication of “Streets of Laredo,” in 1993, he stopped. Ossana eventually coaxed him back to the typewriter, and soon she was editing, and sometimes rewriting, his work. In 2011, McMurtry married Faye Kesey, Ken’s widow, after a six-week courtship; the couple lived with Ossana, an arrangement that apparently suited everyone well enough.

In 2006, McMurtry and Ossana won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay for adapting Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”; McMurtry thanked his typewriter in his acceptance speech. At the Oscars, to which he wore bluejeans and boots, he thanked “all the booksellers of the world.” But Archer City never became the literary destination that he’d hoped, and his store, Booked Up, struggled financially. In 2012, McMurtry auctioned off hundreds of thousands of books. “This was his dream, to turn Archer City into a book town,” Getschow, a friend of McMurtry’s, said at the time. “Now this is the end of the dream. There is just no way around it.” McMurtry had followed the family tradition after all, lashing himself to a dying industry and getting his heart broken in the process. After his death, the Texas legislature passed a resolution honoring his memory; two years later, a state representative said that schools “might need to ban ‘Lonesome Dove’ ” for being too sexually explicit.

McMurtry can seem like a figure from another era. He came of age in a literary economy that allowed for the slow building of a career. Until the breakout success of “Lonesome Dove,” he described himself, with characteristic understatement, as a “midlist writer” and a “minor regional novelist.” (A friend once had those words emblazoned on a T-shirt for him.) He wrote about a Texas that was majority white, with agrarian roots and a preoccupation with its pioneer past. The version of the state which had such a hold on McMurtry, the one he alternately rebelled against and embraced, no longer feels so central—there are plenty of other Texas stories to tell. (For another take on the rollicking nineteenth-century epic, try “Texas: The Great Theft,” by Carmen Boullosa.)

Last year, the Archer County News reported that Booked Up had been purchased by another Texas celebrity: Chip Gaines, the telegenically scruffy co-star of “Fixer Upper,” the home-renovation show that’s been credited (or blamed) for the spread of the “farmhouse chic” aesthetic. Gaines, who spent summers as a child in Archer City, said that he and his wife had gone through McMurtry’s collection and, with an eye for beautiful bindings, picked out books to be showcased in a new hotel that they’re opening in Waco this fall; the fate of the others is unclear, but the couple say that they plan to donate a large portion back to Archer City. Gaines told me that he identified with McMurtry’s late-in-life return to small-town Texas. “He chose to go back to his roots, back to simple beginnings,” he said. “I just hope I make him proud.” ♦

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LONESOME DOVE

A novel (simon & schuster classics).

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

GENERAL FICTION

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by Larry McMurtry

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PERSPECTIVES

IN THE NEWS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah ( The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

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by Kristin Hannah

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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• Nov 14, 2020

Book Review: Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove starts with pigs and ends with sorrow. In between lies one of the best books I’ve read.

The novel is set in the American West after the Civil War. The protagonists, Woodrow Call and Augustus “Gus” McCrae, are former Texas Rangers who retired a decade ago and spent the intervening years in the little Texas town of Lonesome Dove. Nominally, they run the Hat Creek Cattle Company with a few of their old comrades (and two blue pigs, who kick off the book by eating a snake). But mostly they’re just whiling away the hours.

This part of the story is easy, pleasurable reading. McMurtry writes in third-person omniscient, meandering from one character to the next and bringing them to life quickly and completely. Call is a workaholic prone to brooding. (“Give Call a grievance,” we hear early on, “however silly, and he would save it like money.”) Gus is voluble and lazy. Pea Eye is simple but solid. Deets is as reliable as he is quirky (he makes his pants out of quilts). Newt is young and desperate to please.

Even minor characters get distinctive traits. Lippy “was so named because his lower lip was about the size of the flap on a saddlebag. He could tuck enough snuff under it to last a normal person at least a month; in general the lip lived a life of its own, there toward the bottom of his face. Even when he was just sitting quietly, studying his cards, the lip waved and wiggled as if it had a breeze blowing across it.” And Joe “had a habit of staring straight ahead. Though Call assumed he had a neck joint like other men, he had never seen him use it.”

For a while, it seems like the Hat Creek crew might putter around Lonesome Dove forever. Then Jake, another ex-ranger—on the run from the law, as it happens—rides into town and mentions that he’s been to Montana and seen vast tracts of good, unsettled land there. This lights a fire under Call. He spurs the boys into motion, leading them on cattle raids across the Mexican border and hiring extra hands to help drive the animals north. So begins a great, three-thousand-mile trek from some of the lowest latitudes of the country to the highest.

Things get hairy almost immediately. Death comes fast on the drive, and the dangers are too varied to guard against: snake-plagued river crossings, lightning storms on the open plains, searing droughts, and worse. Likable characters are abused and killed. Some of your favorites won’t make it. Prepare to be heartbroken.

Yet there’s no grand goal here. Call and Gus aren’t trying to open up the American West—they already served their time protecting settlers along the shifting frontier. Montana is a vague destination, not a mission; Call essentially leaves Lonesome Dove on a whim. Gus goes along for lack of anything better to do, but not eagerly. “Here you’ve brought these cattle all this way,” he complains to his partner around the halfway mark, “with all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you don’t have no reason in this world to be doing it.”

McMurtry has plenty of reasons for the drive, though. In his preface to the 25th-anniversary edition of Lonesome Dove , he argues that “the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity,” namely Newt’s. His mother is long dead, and his father might be one of the Rangers.

But that wasn’t the thread that stood out most to me. The book is filled with restless souls regretting all sorts of errors. Gus wishes he’d married his sweetheart when he had the chance. “I expect it was the major mistake of my life, letting her slip by,” he tells Call. For his part, the quieter man laments getting involved with women at all. Jake can’t believe he’s committed hanging crimes. July Johnson, the Kansas sheriff pursuing Jake, hates himself for leaving three of his charges to face a murderer. And so on.

Aging is the through-line here—aging and change. Gus and Call are past their primes. They were legendary Rangers once, but now they’re fading into irrelevancy. The younger generation doesn’t hold them in the same esteem. “I guess they forgot us, like they forgot the Alamo,” August observes after the owner of a bar tries to kick him out for demanding respectful treatment. “Why wouldn’t they?” Call answers. “We ain’t been around.”

The West is moving on too. The buffalo are nearly done, pushed to the brink of extinction by wasteful hunting. Gus rides past several slaughter sites where it looks like “a whole herd had been wiped out, for a road of bones stretched far across the plain.” The Native Americans aren’t in much better shape—despite their fearsome reputation, their numbers have dwindled in tandem with the buffalos’. “With those millions of animals gone,” Gus reflects, “and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed. Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants—of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters.”

This is all tragic, but it’s beautifully done.

A couple things bothered me, however. That 25th-anniversary preface contains what feel like major spoilers. They aren’t, but I’d still skip this section until you’re done with the story proper. (Unless you want to start the book as grumpy as I did.)

More significantly, while Deets shines as the only African American in the Hat Creek outfit (“He’s the best man we got,” Call says late in the drive; “Best man we’ve ever had,” Augustus agrees), the one Native American that gets extended time on the page is a vicious monster. We meet some friendlier indigenous people in passing, but I kept waiting for a real counterweight: a kind Comanche, or a decent Sioux. It never happens. (To be fair, McMurtry does have Gus take a few stabs at articulating why the Native Americans aren’t always hospitable. “We won more than our share with the natives,” he remarks near the end of the novel. They didn’t invite us here, you know. We got no call to be vengeful.” And earlier, he puzzles Call by saying, “I think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side.” I don’t think this is enough, but it’s something.)

Other than that … it’s hard to complain. Lonesome Dove doesn’t close with a climactic shootout like you might find in other westerns. But it doesn’t need to. The journey—Gus and Call’s last shot at big, unnecessary adventure—is the point.

And it’s a masterpiece.

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Millions of visitors. Thousands of exhibits. One fiendish killer.

Neva’s goals at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago are simple. Enjoy the spectacle—perhaps the greatest the United States has ever put on. (The world’s fair to end all world’s fairs!) Perform in the exposition’s Algerian Theatre to the best of her abilities. And don’t be found out as a witch.

Easy enough … until the morning she looks up in the Theatre and sees strangely marked insects swarming a severed hand in the rafters.

"... a wild ride sure to please lovers of supernatural historical mysteries." – Publishers Weekly

Get your copy on: Amazon | Apple | Audible | Google | Kindle Unlimited | Spotify | Other Platforms

How Lonesome Dove Rekindled My Love for Storytelling

I picked up Lonesome Dove after reading a New York Times Book Review on the newly published Larry McMurtry biography by Tracy Daughtery.

McMurtry died on March 25, 2021, at eighty-four years old. One of the reviewer’s comments from the biography’s introduction captured me. It said Larry McMurtry was a writer in the truest sense. You can be sure he would be writing if he had any free time in his daily life. Writing was his default. Writing was his joy. He was a storyteller who told his stories by writing them down. 

This review spoke of his first and most famous book, Lonesome Dove , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. He also wrote The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment.

Despite McMurtry’s accolades, I didn’t start reading Lonesome Dove . I hesitated because of its sheer size. The Kindle version has 946 pages. I rarely stay interested in a book for that long. Then I read that McMurtry grew up in south Texas near the Mexico border, which gave him cowboy cred.

I decided to go for it. I downloaded it to my Kindle and told Kathy. She said, “I read that book over forty years ago. I loved it. I want to reread it. We can talk about it.” Now I was all in.

This book moves at the pace of a cattle drive. A cattle drive that lasts three thousand miles. Now, you might think that sounds boring. The truth is, the characters are so good, and the situations they get into are so interesting I didn’t want the cattle drive to end. I just wanted to continue being with these men and women. 

When one of my favorite characters died unexpectedly, I mourned him. I was sad that whole day despite being on a Caribbean cruise. That’s how real these people, these fictional characters, were to me.

I found myself continually asking the question, “How can this author know people so well?”

Here are a few quotes on the author’s insights into people.

“I figured out something, Lorie,” he said. “I figured out why you and me get along so well. You know more than you say, and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.”

“If we shoot him, we’ll have Gus for a cook,” Call said. “In that case, we’ll have to eat, talk, or else starve to death listening.”

He did not like travel—the thought of it made him unhappy. And yet, when he went home to Mexico, he felt unhappy too, for his wife was disappointed in him and let him know it every day. He had never been sure what she wanted—after all, their children were beautiful—but whatever it was, he had not been able to give it to her. His daughters were his delight, but they would soon all marry and be gone, leaving him no protection from his wife. 

A sentence like this...

“He grew lonely and could not remember who he had been.”

I was always drawn to the romance of the cowboy way. It was a simpler time in our country’s history. It was a time of clear right and wrong, quick justice, survival, and the search for a better life.

Lonesome Dove captures the spirit of this history.

It is the best fiction book I ever read. I highly recommend it. The time you spend will be entertaining. And in the end, you’ll have met and spent time with some great cowboys.

Have you ever been so deeply connected to a book? If so, which one? Comment on LinkedIn.

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Lonesome Dove author and Brokeback Mountain screenwriter Larry McMurtry dies at 84

The Pulitzer-winning author of novels including Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show, and Oscar-winning screenwriter, examined the American west

Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer prize-winning author and screenwriter who examined the reality of the American west in novels including Lonesome Dove, has died.

McMurtry, 84, was the author of more than 30 novels, from Terms of Endearment to The Last Picture Show, and received an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for his work on Brokeback Mountain with Diana Ossana, an award he famously accepted wearing jeans and cowboy boots. His death was confirmed to the New York Times by a spokesperson for his family.

McMurtry, who was born in Texas, published his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, in 1961. Set in a north Texas town on a cattle ranch, it was filmed as Hud, with Paul Newman in the leading role. His third novel, The Last Picture Show, a coming-of-age story set in a small Texas town, was adapted into a 1971 film starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd, and brought him to wider fame.

The film adaptation of his novel Terms of Endearment, the story of a widowed mother and her daughter starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson, won the Oscar for best picture, while his 1985 novel Lonesome Dove , following retired Texas rangers driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana in the 1870s, won him a Pulitzer prize and was adapted into a mini-series starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones.

“I wrote the book and saw it become acclaimed, more so – indeed much more so – than any of my other 28 fictions,” McMurtry wrote of Lonesome Dove in his memoir, Literary Life. But he described the novel as “the Gone With the Wind of the West … a pretty good book; it’s not a towering masterpiece”.

Barack Obama, when presenting McMurtry with a National Humanities Medal in 2015, said: “He wrote about the Texas he knew from his own life, and then the old west as he heard it through the stories of his grandfather’s – on his grandfather’s porch. And in Lonesome Dove, the story of two ex-Texas Rangers in the 19th century, readers found out something essential about their own souls, even if they’d never been out west or been on a ranch.”

McMurtry told NPR in 2014 that he did not buy into the myth of cowboy as hero. “To me it was hollow, and I think it was hollow for my father, though he would not have ever brought that to his conscious mind. He totally loved cowboys, and so did most of the cowboys he worked with, and that got him through his life. But he knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t last another generation.”

McMurtry was also an antiquarian bookseller, writing in Literary Life that his collection, which spanned more than 30,000 volumes, was “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves”. Accepting his Oscar in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain , he took the opportunity to thank booksellers and said: “Remember that Brokeback Mountain was a book before it was a movie,” he said. “From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world, all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book, a wonderful culture which we mustn’t lose.”

As PEN America president from 1989 to 1991, McMurtry was a staunch defender of free speech, testifying before Congress on behalf of PEN in order to oppose provisions of federal immigration laws that allowed the US to exclude writers and others on ideological grounds. “In addition to his epic portrayals and subversions of the American west, McMurtry was through and through a vigorous defender of the freedom to write,” said PEN America President Ayad Akhtar. “We’ve lost a giant of American literature, and a giant in the history of PEN America.”

James L Brooks, who directed the adaptation of Terms of Endearment, called McMurtry “among the best writers ever” on Twitter . “I remember when he sent me on my way to adapt Terms – his refusal to let me hold him in awe. And the fact that he was personally working the cash register of his rare book store as he did so.”

“McMurtry is truly one of giants of American literature, in the very rich tradition of Western storytelling,” said his publisher in the UK, Jeremy Trevathan at Macmillan. “He was a real ‘book person’ too and spent his life not only as a prize-winning novelist and critic, but also as a bookseller and rare-book scout. He was a gentleman and a modern ‘man of letters’, which is a rare thing these days.”

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Miniseries – Lonesome Dove

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Headlined by Robert Duvall's sublimely rowdy performance, Lonesome Dove brings Larry McMurtry's beloved book to resounding life in an epic treatment that broadens the possibilities of what the silver screen is capable of.

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LONESOME DOVE

A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize— winning classic, Lonesome Dove , the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy , is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.

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About Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove , three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

“If you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove .” — USA Today

“Everything about Lonesome Dove feels true . . . These are real people, and they are still larger than life.” — Nicholas Lemann, The New York Times Book Review

“ Lonesome Dove is Larry McMurtry’s loftiest novel." — Los Angeles Times

"A marvelous novel . . . moves with joyous energy . . . amply imagined and crisply, lovingly written. I haven’t enjoyed a book more this year . . . a joyous epic." — Newsweek

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About The Book

About the author.

Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove , three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lived in Archer City, Texas.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June 15, 2010)
• Length: 864 pages
• ISBN13: 9781439195260

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Raves and Reviews

“If you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove .”— USA Today

“Everything about Lonesome Dove feels true . . . These are real people, and they are still larger than life.”—Nicholas Lemann, The New York Times Book Review

“ Lonesome Dove is Larry McMurtry’s loftiest novel."— Los Angeles Times

"A marvelous novel . . . moves with joyous energy . . . amply imagined and crisply, lovingly written. I haven't enjoyed a book more this year . . . a joyous epic."-- Newsweek

"The finest novel that McMurtry has yet accomplished . . . Lonesome Dove has all the action anyone could possibly imagine . . . [and] both in general and in details, the authority of exact authenticity . . . superb."-- Chicago Tribune

Awards and Honors

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A new bio celebrates the enduring greatness of Larry McMurtry

Mcmurtry was too country for the city, and too city for the country, but as tracy daugherty shows, the ‘lonesome dove’ author had a reach beyond both.

To be a Texas writer these last 50 years or so is to labor beneath the branches of the great Larry McMurtry oak. Even now, two years after his passing, his influence and his presence are inescapable. Practically all the older writers I know here in Austin are one or two degrees of separation from McMurtry, either a pal, one of his many female companions, a target of his barbs or just someone trying to explore a niche he left untouched, which isn’t easy, given an oeuvre that stretches from “ The Last Picture Show ” and “ Lonesome Dove ” to “ Terms of Endearment ” and the screenplay for “ Brokeback Mountain .”

The question I’ve heard lately, though, is: How good was he; I mean, really? The editor Michael Korda once termed McMurtry, only half-jokingly, “the Flaubert of the Plains.” Others invoke Tolstoy; “Lonesome Dove” has been called “America’s ‘War and Peace.’” But while he produced several classics, they represent only a small fraction of his enormous output, and the rest of it, especially in his final decades, was seldom of the same quality. A can of Dr Pepper and a Hershey bar beside his typewriter, he wrote his famous five pages every morning, and every year the books, often sequels and prequels to his greatest hits, kept coming. Much of it was dreck. “ Rhino Ranch ,” anyone?

There’s a debate here about how we judge artists, whether by the entirety of a career or its peaks. But McMurtry’s valleys are too many to overlook. In the pantheon of postwar writers, he probably doesn’t deserve a seat beside Mailer, Vidal and Capote. The Austin novelist Stephen Harrigan, one of his acolytes, suggests comparing him to Wallace Stegner, another Westerner whose prodigious writings, many thought, never got enough respect from Eastern literati. Maybe.

McMurtry’s journey from childhood on a North Texas ranch through teaching posts at Rice University, running a bookstore in Georgetown and his final years in Tucson is told capably in the Houston author Tracy Daugherty’s “ Larry McMurtry: A Life .” This is the first McMurtry biography, probably not the last, and better than most quick turnarounds. The author of biographies on the writers Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion and McMurtry’s Austin pal Billy Brammer, Daugherty has a good grasp of Texas literary history and the cooperation of those closest to his subject. If his prose is unadorned and his approach profoundly middlebrow, well, so was McMurtry’s.

McMurtry was a bit of an odd duck, and not just because, like many creative types raised in rural America, he never truly fit into any milieu: too country for the city, too city for the country. Coming of age in the 1950s, his people were hard-pressed, and hard-bitten, cattlemen and their wives, the men wistful about the cowboy’s passing, the women less so; the themes that fueled his work were those he grew up with. McMurtry was a classic small-town bookworm, a tall, gawky kid with heavy black glasses and a thick head of black hair. He did his chores, but with little brio, and was so unsuited to ranch life his parents gave him no trouble about going off to school in Houston.

I grew up in Central Texas, three hours south of McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, and I recall the moment when it hit me: Wait, I can write for a living? Daugherty does a nice job tracing McMurtry’s own realization, all but living inside Rice’s Fondren Library, poring over Dostoyevsky and Henry James and Cervantes. By the time he entered graduate school, he had completed his first two (unpublished) novels.

For a writer who invested his every fiber in the physical book — endlessly scouting and reselling them, even running bookstores for much of his life — it’s ironic that, with the notable exception of “Lonesome Dove,” McMurtry achieved far more fame from Hollywood’s versions of his stories than his own. His first novel, “ Horseman, Pass By ,” drew acclaim; one reviewer brought up Willa Cather. Although the book did not sell particularly well, once Hollywood made it into the Paul Newman vehicle “ Hud ,” McMurtry’s success was assured. The same dynamic fueled his next hit, “The Last Picture Show,” a little-noticed 1966 novel transformed into a smash 1971 movie.

Daugherty’s book is dominated by three themes: McMurtry’s writing life, his career as a bookseller and his relationships, especially those with women. The first is solid, the second a snooze and the third kind of fascinating. After the failure of a post-undergrad marriage, McMurtry amassed a large and varied group of close female friends, including the actresses Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd and the writers Maureen Orth and Beverly Lowry. Some relationships were romantic, others eased into platonic, but the long phone calls and letters he lavished on these women, Daugherty demonstrates, were the core of McMurtry’s emotional life. (His friendship with the boorish Ken Kesey gets far too much space in this book for my taste.)

Into his 40s, McMurtry concentrated on what he knew best: the tensions between Old West and new, the dying ranches, farms and small towns, what was lost as American life transitioned from rural to urban. Then, after years of demystifying the frontier, he bowed to its allure. “Lonesome Dove,” published in 1985, was a massive bestseller and a landmark television miniseries. It made him an icon — the supreme chronicler of the West, and of the dreams found and lost there.

It also, it appears, took something out of him. One senses McMurtry’s inspirations were already ebbing by 1991, when he underwent a grueling, multi-hour heart bypass surgery. Daugherty makes a compelling case that this was the turning point in his career. Afterward he suffered a crippling bout of depression, staring out windows much of each day, which is when Diana Ossana, a woman he had first spied dining at a Tucson restaurant, enters the frame.

When Ossana, until then an unknown legal writer, began co-authoring McMurtry’s novels, many in the publishing world were aghast. They debated whether she was a gold-digger or the second coming of Yoko Ono. The reality, Daugherty shows, was neither. By taking him into her home — if there was a romantic interest, it was brief — Ossana rescued McMurtry’s career and maybe his life. Once he recovered, they wrote together seamlessly. By the 2000s, spurred by Ossana, McMurtry was more active than ever, which wasn’t always a good thing. The reviews of his late books could be scathing. One prominent critic for the New York Times, Dwight Garner, said that “a lot of [McMurtry’s] stuff verges on being — how to put this? — typed rather than written.”

If the partnership of McMurtry and Ossana left a mixed legacy, Ossana deserves credit as the force behind by far the greatest triumph of McMurtry’s late career, the “Brokeback Mountain” screenplay, for which they shared an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. She also was involved in a string of McMurtry-derived television movies, not all gems. Variety dismissed one, “Comanche Moon,” as “at times cartoonishly bad.”

I suspect few Texans give a whit where McMurtry ranks as a writer, or whether his hits outnumber his misses. He’s given us so much. He cared about his reputation, but not obsessively. For years his favorite thing to wear was a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Minor Regional Novelist.” I love that. It not only speaks to his innate humility, it’s a sentiment many Texas — and mid-continent — writers can identify with. When he died, I printed up 40 of the shirts myself and gave them to writer friends around town. When I see someone wearing one now, it reminds us both of the long life, and reach, of Larry’s oak.

Bryan Burrough, editor at large at Texas Monthly, is the author or co-author of seven books, including “Barbarians at the Gate” and, most recently, “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.” He lives in Austin.

Larry McMurtry

By Tracy Daugherty

St. Martin’s Press. 560 pp. $35

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