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Pastures of the Empty Page

Author: George Getschow

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1477327878

"Larry McMurtry is the author of dozens of novels (Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show), screenplays (Brokeback Mountain, Terms of Endearment), and essays ("Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen"), among other writings. He won the Pulitzer Prize, Oscars, and Emmys, among other honors. When he died in March 2021, he was possibly Texas's best-known and best-loved writer, an honor he famously dismissed with a t-shirt that read "minor regional novelist." George Getschow worked with McMurtry through the Archer City Writer's Workshop, an annual three-day event in McMurtry's hometown that pairs emerging and established writers. He's leveraged that network to build this collection of essays paying homage to McMurtry, only a handful of which have been previously published. The pieces in the volume pay tribute to McMurtry in a variety of ways. Stephen Graham Jones captures the thrill of seeing the legendary author prowling the stacks in his used-book store, wondering if his own books might one day be on those same shelves. Sarah Bird talks about McMurtry's "messy but mythic west" that made Texas appealing to her. Elizabeth Crook talks about how difficult it is to let go of McMurtry's characters, particularly those from Lonesome Dove, a book Geoff Dyer also found himself surprisingly unable to ignore despite everything he knew about it (it's long, slow to develop, etc.). Greg Curtis recalls McMurtry as a fellow student at Rice, and Charlie McMurtry, Larry's brother, writes about growing up with him in excerpts from his dissertation. Stephanie Elizondo Griest is enamored and perplexed by a shelf of books in McMurtry's private collection that he called his "runaways," travel accounts by 19th-century women. Diana Ossana, McMurtry's longtime screenwriting partner and one of his dearest friends, writes movingly about their friendship and many collaborations. Getschow has written an introduction that sketches the contours of McMurtry's life"--

Pastures of the Empty Page

Author: George Getschow

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1477327894

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A collection of essays that offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America’s preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life. When he died in 2021, Larry McMurtry was one of America’s most revered writers. The author of treasured novels such as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, and coauthor of the screenplays for Brokeback Mountain and Streets of Laredo, McMurtry created unforgettable characters and landscapes largely drawn from his life growing up on the family’s hardscrabble ranch outside his hometown of Archer City, Texas. Pastures of the Empty Page brings together fellow writers to honor the man and his impact on American letters. Paulette Jiles, Stephen Harrigan, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Lawrence Wright take up McMurtry’s piercing and poetic vision—an elegiac literature of place that demolished old myths of cowboy culture and created new ones. Screenwriting partner Diana Ossana reflects on their thirty-year book and screenwriting partnership; other contributors explore McMurtry’s reading habits and his passion for bookselling. And brother Charlie McMurtry shares memories of their childhood on the ranch. In contrast to his curmudgeonly persona, Larry McMurtry emerges as a trustworthy friend and supportive mentor. McMurtry was famously self-deprecating, but as his admirers attest, this self-described “minor regional writer” was an artist for the ages.

Larry McMurtry and the West

Author: Mark Busby

Publisher: University of North Texas Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780929398341

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This is the first major single-authored book in almost twenty years to examine the life and work of Texas' foremost novelist and to develop coherent patterns of theme, structure, symbol, imagery, and influence in Larry McMurtry's work. The study focuses on the novelist's relationship to the Southwest, theorizing that his writing exhibits a deep ambivalence toward his home territory. The course of his career demonstrates shifting attitudes that have led him toward, away from, and then back again to his home place and the "cowboy god" that dominates its mythology. The book utilizes original materials from five library special collections, as well as interviews with McMurtry, his family, and his friends, such as Ken Kesey.

Novel Competition

Author: Evan Brier

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1609389395

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"Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional effort to make the American novel matter after 1965. During this era, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture vied with novels for a specific kind of prestige - often figured as "importance" or "relevance" - that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. This trans-media competition, Brier argues, is a crucial but largely unacknowledged event in the literary and economic history of the American novel. In the face of it, the novel lost some of the symbolic specialness it formerly held. That loss, in turn, generated not just a much-discussed rhetoric of crisis but also a host of unexamined, intertwined effects on both literary form and the business of novel production. Drawing on a range of novels and on the archives of publishers, editors, agents, and authors, Novel Competition shows how fiction's declining position in a transformed "popular-prestige" economy reshaped the post-1965 American novel as art form, cultural institution, and commodity"--

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

Author: Larry McMurtry

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2018-05-29

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 163149354X

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This landmark collection, brimming with his signature wit and incomparable sensibility, is Larry McMurtry’s classic tribute to his home and his people. Before embarking on what would become one of the most prominent writing careers in American literature, spanning decades and indelibly shaping the nation’s perception of the West, Larry McMurtry knew what it meant to come from Texas. Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father’s ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores all the singular elements that define his land and community, revealing the surprising and particular challenges in the “dying . . . rural, pastoral way of life.” “The gold standard for understanding Houston’s brash rootlessness and civic insecurities” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), In a Narrow Grave offers a timeless portrait of the vividly human, complex, full-blooded Texan.

Larry McMurtry

Author: Tracy Daugherty

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2023-09-12

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1250282349

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*Pulitzer Prize Finalist* 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.