Larry McMurtry

April 1, 2023

The biographer of Donald Barthelme, novelist/essayist Daugherty now assays the life and work of Pulitzer Prize--winning King-of the-West Larry McMurtry. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 3, 2023
In this authoritative outing, literary biographer Daugherty (Just One Catch) traces the rise of author Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) from “minor regional novelist” to Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller. Writing that McMurtry was born “into a dying way of life,” Daugherty details the author’s childhood on a ranch near Archer City, Tex., where he listened to his cowboy uncles talk about what cattle drives were like before “the appearance of barbed wire spelled the end of the open range.” McMurtry became fascinated by “the Old West” and wrote two westerns before he turned 22, emerging as a prolific wordsmith who claimed he “can’t do more than two drafts of anything.” Daugherty delves into McMurtry’s complex relationships with women, discussing the novelist’s quasi-romantic entanglement with his first literary agent, Dorothea Oppenheimer, and his coy answers whenever he was asked about the nature of his relationship with collaborator Diana Ossana, with whom he wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. This is no hagiography—Daugherty contends that McMurtry’s five-pages-a-day writing routine privileged quantity over quality. Still, he takes the bestseller’s oeuvre seriously and the literary analysis is keen, as when Daugherty argues that McMurtry’s work is united by the “belief that nothing important could really be explained; it could only be experienced in the daily clutter of stuff that fiction was so good at cataloguing.” This is worth saddling up for.

Starred review from June 1, 2023
Larry McMurtry was a quintessential man of letters, an author of novels, articles, essays, book reviews, and screenplays and the proprietor of one of America's largest used bookstores. Hailing from small-town Texas, McMurtry was raised as a cowboy but became enchanted with books early on. He devoured the pulps and mastered the European classics. Called the "Flaubert of the Plains," his style would blend his experiences and omnivorous reading. He observed, "Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters." After the death of Hemingway, McMurtry was among a crop of new authors that included Kesey, Roth, Bellow, Heller, Atwood, and Le Guin that ushered in the 1960s and a new era. Though he was a bestselling novelist, public intellectual, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award, a National Humanities Medal recipient, and author of what would become one of the most highly rated miniseries in history, Lonesome Dove, McMurtry never felt accepted by the coastal gatekeepers. Literary biographer Daugherty blends authoritative research with resplendent prose, providing absorbing detail to illuminate how McMurtry's childhood, academic career, domestic life, and friendships shaped his personality and work. This flowing, even avuncular portrait definitively situates McMurtry's oeuvre in the American canon.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 15, 2023
The late Pulitzer Prize-winning Texas novelist receives a thoughtful yet appropriate critical treatment in the hands of literary biographer Daugherty. Larry McMurtry (1936-2021) once said that he was "drawn to stories of vanishing crafts...or trades," such as cowboying and bookselling. The Last Picture Show (1966) was a perfect example, a depiction of a tiny crossroads town in north Texas, where McMurtry grew up, where there was nothing for young people to do and, with the death of the town's moral heart and patriarch, no hope for a brighter future. The author got out of that town, Archer City, as soon as he could, partly to get away from a malevolent father who had little sympathy for his bookish son's interests. So it was that McMurtry wound up in Houston, teaching at Rice University and scouting for books while building the wherewithal for a bookshop of his own. He frequently retreated to back rooms and moldy basements to write, and if Sherman Alexie criticized his later revisionist Western Lonesome Dove as colonial, McMurtry gave voice to many a voiceless Texan, especially the taciturn, repressed women of his small-town youth. Daugherty, who has chronicled the lives of Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion, and Joseph Heller, is a perceptive critic who isn't shy pointing out that McMurtry's literary output was of decidedly mixed quality. He would write a classic like Last Picture Show, then follow it up with a sequel--or, in this case, several sequels--that tended to make the collective whole weaker. McMurtry's vision of the disappearing frontier and of the dead-end hamlets that followed it yielded his best work (including Horseman, Pass By and Streets of Laredo), but his later-in-life projects with partner Diana Ossana on screenplays such as Brokeback Mountain will endure, too. Despite his frequent ill temper and hermetic tendencies, McMurtry emerges as a well-rounded, if quirky human--and certainly a memorable one. A definitive life of the novelist/bookseller/scriptwriter/curmudgeon of interest to any McMurtry fan.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.