David Streitfeld — Western Star: the life and legends of Larry McMurtry
The definitive biography of Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry — Pulitzer winner, bookseller, screenwriter — tracing his literary life from Texas to Hollywood.
Why we picked this
McMurtry was a Pulitzer-winning novelist who ran a bookstore empire from a small Texas town — Streitfeld's biography captures the contradictions of a writer who couldn't stop mythologizing the West while trying to move past it.
David Streitfeld, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, presents the first major biography of Larry McMurtry — the author of Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, and The Last Picture Show, who was also a legendary bookseller and screenwriter. Western Star chronicles McMurtry’s prolific career, his complicated relationship with Texas, and his love of books that led him to build one of the largest used bookstores in America from his hometown of Archer City.
McMurtry’s life contained contradictions worth exploring: a man who mythologized the American West while insisting its mythology was bankrupt, who won the Pulitzer and the Academy Award but kept returning to a town of fewer than 2,000 people. Streitfeld brings the reporting skills and literary sensibility to do the story justice.
The event is free at Politics and Prose, with livestream available.