![]() ![]() 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.Īlthough 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. 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. ![]() “He did not share my enthusiasm for horses, either,” Korda recalled. He was surprised, and perhaps a bit disappointed, to find the young writer dressed “like a graduate student,” in slacks and a sports coat. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The family ranch occupied a hard, dry, largely featureless corner of north-central Texas, and was perched on a rise known as Idiot Ridge. As a boy, Larry McMurtry rode Polecat, a Shetland pony with a mean streak and a habit of dragging him through mesquite thickets. ![]()
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