WESTERN STAR

The man who “told Texans and the world what Texas was and what it wanted to be.”

Streitfeld, a New York Times journalist, enjoyed a long friendship with Larry McMurtry (1936–2021), who, he holds, “created modern Texas literature.” More than that, McMurtry—who lived outside Texas for most of his adult life—crafted any number of memorable films and, as a bookseller, made a bibliophilic mecca of his hometown of Archer City, Texas, the thinly disguised setting of his famed novel and even more famed film The Last Picture Show. Streitfeld spends many pages on this film, though he has some sharp observations on its underlying meaning, including all the reasons that McMurtry should have peeled out from the place as soon as he could: “Thalia may be named after the muse of poetry but the novel is a portrait of what a town without books is like, a cultural desert where no new information comes in beyond the illusions provided by the movies.” Streitfeld often returns to McMurtry’s best-known novel, Lonesome Dove, with some juicy Hollywood gossip—for instance, the studio behind the miniseries wanted the old-time cowboys’ herd to stampede so that, the cows dispensed with, the filming costs would fall, at which the producers kept the herd and then sold it for a profit after filming was completed. Streitfeld turns in plenty of interesting asides along the way, among them McMurtry’s wish that John Wayne star in a film version of his novel Streets of Laredo. (Wayne declined, saying that in the script “I was a whiner. Why the hell should I do that?”) For all its back-and-forthness, Streitfeld’s biography paints a revealing portrait of McMurtry, who had plenty of foibles but also plenty of talents, as well as a roster of enemies who ranged from the Texas Rangers (the cops, not the baseball team) and gossip writer Sally Quinn.

A long but worthy life of a writer whose work continues to shape American literature.