How the West Won

Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry by David Streitfeld; Mariner Books, 464 pp., $35

Although he grew up in a household devoid of books, in a town that lacked a library, Larry McMurtry ended up with a personal collection of 28,000 volumes. Like fellow novelists Louise Erdrich, Ann Patchett, and Emma Straub, he also sold books, and by the time of his death at 84 in 2021, he had filled four buildings in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, with an inventory of more than 400,000 volumes. A prolific and popular author whose bestsellers included Lonesome Dove (1985), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975), he nevertheless put more store in acquiring other people’s books to line his shelves. “Forming that library, and reading it,” he wrote in a 2008 memoir aptly titled Books, “is surely one of the principal achievements of my life.” Self-mockingly sporting a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Minor Regional Novelist,” he tended to belittle the merits of his own award-winning writing. As late as 2009, he was concluding, “Little of my work in fiction is pedestrian, but, on the other hand, none of it is really great.”

In 1998, journalist David Streitfeld was researching the bookselling business when he wandered into Booked Up, the store that McMurtry then ran in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, and began a close and lasting friendship with McMurtry that lasted for the rest of the author’s life. Streitfeld notes that he had never met or even read McMurtry, which might account for why, almost three decades later, the biography he has written is more about McMurtry the bookseller and movie man than McMurtry the novelist. For sensitive analysis of the McMurtry canon, turn to Larry McMurtry: A Life, the fine literary biography that Tracy Daugherty published in 2023. Streitfeld, who refers to his subject throughout as “Larry,” draws on pungent personal anecdotes as well as interviews and archives for his portrait of an accidental celebrity.

McMurtry’s second novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), had sold only 1,518 copies when Hollywood producer Irving Ravetch came across a copy and decided to make a movie out of it, changing the title to Hud. Although McMurtry had nothing to do with the production, which starred Paul Newman and Patricia Neal, it brought him more attention than his writing had. The making of his third novel, The Last Picture Show (1966), into a 1971 movie starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd propelled him into fame. Streitfeld, who goes off on a tangent about director Peter Bogdanovich, devotes much more space to the movie than to the novel. Aside from writing the novels that they were based on, McMurtry did not have much to do with either Terms of Endearment (1983), starring Debra Winger, Shirley MacLaine, and Jack Nicholson, or the 1989 TV miniseries Lonesome Dove, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. Both productions, though, magnified his reputation, leading to his side hustle as script doctor, tailoring the texts of other writers for film. In 2006, he shared an Oscar with Diana Ossana for adapting Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” to the screen.

McMurtry, who attended the University of North Texas and Rice University and, after stints in California and D.C., moved back to Archer City, set almost all his fiction in Texas. Although he is an iconic Texas writer, he is no cheerleader for his native state. About Archer City, which, with fewer than 2,000 residents, is scarcely a city, he stated, “Simply put, it’s not a nice town.” About larger communities in north-central Texas, he wrote, “Lubbock, Amarillo and Wichita Falls are the three principal cities of the Texas plain, and I have always found them uniformly graceless and unattractive. In summer they are hot and dry, in winter cold, dusty and windswept; the population is rigidly Protestant on the surface and underneath seethes with imperfectly repressed malice.” Streitfeld positions McMurtry within the history and landscape of Texas, but he keeps colliding with McMurtry’s ambivalence toward all things Texan.

Born on a cattle ranch without electricity, indoor plumbing, or a telephone, McMurtry grew up among folk for whom frontier life was still a vivid memory. However, he railed against the glamourizing clichés of western fiction that portrayed his people as rugged, heroic individualists. “The settling of America was violent, misogynistic, brutal, racist, and decimated many of the Native American tribes in the Americas,” he insisted. He was flabbergasted when his attempts at exposing the violence and cruelty of the West in books such as Anything for Billy (1988) and Boone’s Lick (2001) were received as celebrations. He concluded, “Perhaps there are archetypes so powerful that if you go near them they suck you in.”

In a notorious essay, “Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature,” that he published in a 1981 issue of The Texas Observer, McMurtry denounced Texas writers for ignoring the state’s contemporary urban reality and wallowing in sentimentality and nostalgia. Nevertheless, he proceeded to write Lonesome Dove, the story of an epic but disastrous 19th-century trail drive that affirmed the merits of Texas literature. It won the Pulitzer Prize and, especially in its televised incarnation, the hearts of millions for its elegiac evocation of a vanished past. McMurtry regretted the positive spin the producers gave to his violent, dismal tale but lamented even more the hunger of audiences and readers for inspirational myths. “The lies about the West are more powerful than the truth about the West,” he wrote, “so much more powerful that, in a sense, lies about the West are the truths about the West—the West, at least, of the imagination.” It is this chronicler of contradictions, a novelist drawn to failure, who succeeded despite his intentions, who shines brightly in Western Star.

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