I am not a fan of cowboy literature or westerns of any kind, even movies, so I don’t know what prompted me to read Lonesome Dove so many years ago. I remember reading it aloud to my husband on a long drive home from a ski holiday at Mad River Glen in Vermont. Over the years I read much of what McMurtry wrote and watched the films based on his novels. I was sad when I read about his death a couple of years ago.
McMurtry’s life, like his bulging bibliography, is tough to get one’s arms around. (To paraphrase a regional cliché, everything is bigger in a McMurtry novel — especially the page count.) Raised on the outskirts of tiny Archer City, Texas, to a cattle-ranching family and educated in the California hills of Berkeley alongside Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey, McMurtry was a tangle of contradictions. He was a known crank and an infamous flirt; a small-town bohemian; an Oscar winner (for adapting “Brokeback Mountain”) and a pathological antiquarian.
Via Duck Soup
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