Drawing on conversations and voicemails, as well as interviews with author Larry McMurtry’s family and friends, New York Times journalist David Streitfeld delivers a sprawling yet captivating portrait of his longtime friend in Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry.
Intercutting biographical details with in-depth analyses of McMurtry’s novels, nonfiction and screenplays, Streitfeld traces McMurtry’s love of storytelling and books to his childhood and youth on the family ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, where he spent his days avoiding football—an anomaly in pigskin-crazed Texas—and getting lost in everything from King Lear to The Grapes of Wrath to the Bible. During those years, he also developed a passion for acquiring books that would consume him throughout his life (and eventually culminate in his expansive Archer City used bookstore, Booked Up). According to Streitfeld, McMurtry’s childhood on the ranch created a well of experience he drew from during his career: “Larry at age six was already well informed about cattle and cowboys and horses.” Following college, McMurtry studied with the legendary editor and critic Malcolm Cowley in the Stanford writing program, where he met his lifelong friend Ken Kesey and where he established his habit of starting another novel as soon as he finished the previous one.
Streitfeld deftly chronicles McMurtry’s development as a writer and screenwriter, providing deep analyses of McMurtry’s novel Horseman, Pass By, the basis for the Paul Newman-starring film Hud. The success of Hud drove the novel’s sales. In a similar fashion, Streitfeld documents the making of Peter Bogdanovich’s adaptation of The Last Picture Show, McMurtry’s novel based loosely on his high school days in Archer City, as well as the acclaimed miniseries based on Lonesome Dove. Even with that novel’s success, McMurtry thought little of it: “Gone With the Wind is not a despicable book,” he said once in an interview. “It is also not a great book. And that is what I feel about Lonesome Dove.”
In his evocative Western Star, Streitfeld captures the restless genius of McMurtry, whose knack for storytelling “told Texans and the world what Texas was and what it wanted to be.”