Larry McMurtry: A Life

by Tracy Daugherty

Overview

A biography of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry from New York Times bestselling author Tracy Daugherty.

In over forty books, in a career that spanned over sixty years, Larry McMurtry staked his claim as a superior chronicler of the American West, and as the Great Plains’ keenest witness since Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. Larry McMurtry: A Life traces his origins as one of the last American writers who had direct contact with this country’s pioneer traditions. It follows his astonishing career as bestselling novelist, Pulitzer-Prize winner, author of the beloved Lonesome Dove, Academy-Award winning screenwriter, public intellectual, and passionate bookseller. A sweeping and insightful look at a versatile, one-of-a-kind American writer, this book is a must-read for every Larry McMurtry fan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250282330
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	53,553
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Born and raised in Texas, Tracy Daugherty (he/him) is the author of over ten novels and short story collections, a memoir, a book of personal essays, a collection of essays on writing, a novella collection, and several literary biographies. His 2009 biography of Donald Barthelme, Hiding Man, was a New York Times and New Yorker Notable Book, and his 2015 biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song was a New York Times Bestseller. His work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. At Oregon State University he helped found the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Editorial Reviews

07/03/2023

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"A definitive life of the novelist/bookseller/scriptwriter/curmudgeon of interest to any McMurtry fan." - Kirkus (starred review)

"Vastly entertaining... This is the first comprehensive biography of McMurtry, who died in 2021 at the age of 84... [Daugherty] is the right person for this job...He rakes his material into a story that has movement; he’s a good reader of the novels; he has an eye for anecdote and the telling quote; he builds toward extended set pieces." - The New York Times

“Larry McMurtry gave actors the gift of three-dimensional nuanced characters to bring to life in his Western masterpiece Lonesome Dove. Tracy Daugherty’s sweeping and insightful biography allows us a fascinating look into the life and evolution of McMurtry’s outsized talent." –Chris Cooper (July Johnson in Lonesome Dove)

"Tracy Daugherty has produced a superb biography of a remarkable, complicated subject. Larry McMurtry led a nomadic life rich with friendships, loves and widespread achievements in literature, film, family and an avid contemplation of his origins: a difficult undertaking for his biographer who would require a capacity for literary analysis to correct McMurtry's skepticism about the value of his own work. Daugherty's book will go a long way in settling McMurtry's place in American literature." –Thomas McGuane, author of Gallatin Canyon

"Tracy Daughtery’s genius as a biographer lies in the extraordinary detail he is able to glean of his subject’s daily life—and then the imaginative and insightful ways he contextualizes it. This book firmly places the man in his time, an important service to perform for Larry McMurtry, a writer who, as Daughtery justly appraises him, 'staked his claim as a superior chronicler of the American West and as the Great Plains’ keenest witness since Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. He brought as much depth to his enterprise as William Faulkner brought to the South.' And Daughtery’s account is as engaging a read as the best of McMurtry’s own writing." –Madison Smartt Bell, author of Child of Light

“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.” - Booklist, starred

"This is worth saddling up for." - Publishers Weekly

“In Larry McMurtry: A Life, a very readable and even impressive biography, Tracy Daugherty discusses all of McMurtry’s books with both authority and affection. Mr. Daugherty is also absorbing when he writes about McMurtry’s personal life and his nonwriting literary life, which were melded into one.” –Greg Curtis, Wall Street Journal

"Entertaining." - The New Yorker

"Daugherty’s diligently constructed biography will provide memories for those who lived in McMurtry’s era and recall well his novels, along with the movies and series that sprang from them." - bookreporter

"Daugherty has a good grasp of Texas literary history and the cooperation of those closest to his subject." - Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

★ 2023-06-21
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.

Kirkus Reviews