Larry McMurtry's Tall Tales

3 days ago

Larry McMurtry grew up in a storytelling Texas family, where the myth of the cowboy was central, but he became a writer who questioned and deconstructed that myth.
He argued that the American West's traditions were largely invented by writers, artists, and advertisers, and he spent his career exploring the tension between truth and fiction in Western history.
His early novels, like 'Horseman, Pass By' and 'The Last Picture Show,' depicted cowboys and small-town Texans as flawed, aimless, or trapped in a dying way of life, rejecting romantic nostalgia.
McMurtry's masterpiece, 'Lonesome Dove,' presents a cattle drive not as a heroic endeavor but as a haphazard, violent, and often absurd journey undertaken by deeply flawed characters.
He also worked in Hollywood, writing screenplays that sometimes softened his critiques but also produced groundbreaking works like 'Brokeback Mountain,' which challenged Western masculinity myths.
McMurtry himself was a mythmaker, often fictionalizing details of his own life, which a new biography by David Streitfeld explores, revealing his ambiguous relationship with the West's legends.
He believed that Americans, including himself, are inextricably tied to the illusions of the West, and his work aimed to clarify the often-violent realities behind those myths, such as in his commentary on immigration and Anglo history in Arizona.

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