#9 – Larry McMurtry by Tracy Daugherty – 2024 Best Reads

Read any history of Texas and you come to realize, distinctive though its shape and profile has become, it was a place peoples have mostly experienced while they’re moving on to someplace else. Cabeza de Vaca was an early model, stranded on Galveston Island in 1528 he straggled across the region trying to make his way home. But he was hardly the only one, Comanches, Americans, Mexicans, even the French passed through Texas as it awaited its definition.

Texans today are noted for loud self-assertion, but just below the surface is an unfinished project—to make a place out of the disparate dreams and violent expeditions that have led people here. And in the nascent Texas literary world there is a recognition that its chroniclers are still waiting to be celebrated.

The literary biographer Tracy Daugherty puts it this way: “Texas took a long time to solidify as a place, as something to be considered in literature.” (116) And even those Texans who have taken up pen to write about it have not often claimed to be “doing literature.”

Larry McMurtry, the subject of Daugherty’s latest bio, called himself a “minor regional writer,” despite becoming one of the Lone Star State’s most celebrated exports. With the publication of Lonesome Dove and its subsequent TV adaptation in the mid-1980s, McMurtry achieved a level of national renown. And this came on the heels of other major motion picture adaptations of his work, including Hud, The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment.

But McMurtry never fully embraced the limelight. He was awkward, reserved, and terminally anchored to the blasted Southern Plains that had birthed him. Archer City, a place I’ve written about before, was never far from his mind or his writing and he kept a residence there until his death in 2021. He was capable of surprising cruelty in his descriptions of the small town, (“Simply put, it’s not a nice town.” (172)), but he recognized the exquisite longing in himself as part of his inheritance from the place. It was that longing, and the bewildered interior life it created for him and his characters, that fed his art. “Archer City is rather a mess. If I didn’t love the place I’d hate it violently. A bunch of almost inextricably mixxed up kids [sic].” (53)

Tracy Daugherty brings together a great cast of characters in Larry McMurtry: A Life. He relies on letters and interviews with lifelong friends, townspeople, and most of all, the many women whom McMurtry made companions and a part of his emotional support system. Figures like Cybill Shepherd, Polly Platt, Diane Keaton, and his late-in-life cowriter Diana Osuna are all quoted at length.

Like the Texas literary scene, McMurtry’s legacy is still an uncertain thing. The Archer City Writer’s Workshop, which has been bringing writers to Archer City because of Larry for years, has recently taken over McMurtry’s old bookstore there and has plans to turn it into a Literary Center. In the meantime, books like Daugherty’s biography will offer windows on a man whose whole heart spilled out in his writing. If there is a Texas to be found, it certainly has a place in Larry.

Daugherty’s book is a joy to read and captures the many facets of the man. It was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. It makes our Best Reads of 2024 list at #9.

Previous posts on the Best Reads Top Ten:

#10 – Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson