“It’s just a great book.” He pulled his hat down and returned to his beer. “I don’t know about all that,” the cowboy mumbled. For a moment, I felt Don had just drawn me into a fist fight with a stranger. The cowboy squinted down the length of the bar, sizing up the old poet. McMurtry thought the Western was dried up, and then he wrote one!” “ Lonesome Dove is the greatest book ever written,” said the man, pushing back his Stetson.ĭon, undeterred, said it again. The cowboy down the bar perked up at the mention of the novel. Don proclaimed loudly that he believed Lonesome Dove was a farce. Around Beer #2, we began discussing the works of Larry McMurtry. in Old English, Don has contributed his fair share to Texas letters, including an adaptation of Beowulf set in our forgotten section of Texas called the panhandle. At 90, a lifelong newspaperman with a Ph.D. On a pre-Covid Saturday afternoon in Amarillo, I was having a beer with the poet Donald Mace Williams at a bar that was otherwise empty-save for one cowboy drinking alone. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.Amarillo, TX. McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.
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