Download or read book Understanding Larry McMurtry written by Steven Frye and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2017-04-15 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inviting, detailed analysis of the work and characters created by this Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Lonesome Dove and his Academy Award–winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. In Understanding Larry McMurtry, Steven Frye considers a broad range of McMurtry's most important novels and offers detailed textual analyses of works such as Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, Moving On, and Lonesome Dove to reveal the manner in which McMurtry engages the human condition. Characters are at the heart of McMurtry's fiction, whether they are nineteenth- or twentieth-century ranchers, modern rodeo men, or women grappling with the angst and confusion of life in the suburbs of Houston. He has created characters rich in texture, such as Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, not only to encourage an understanding of the persistent force of American mythology but also to transcend type so that they emerge as quintessentially human figures grappling with circumstances beyond their control. McMurtry portrays with depth and insight the conundrums of the modern moment and its relation to heritage, and he deals as well with the intensities of the human mind as it negotiates with a complex and sometimes indifferent world. In Understanding Larry McMurtry, Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of one of the most important living authors, one who has emerged as a central figure in a rich and compelling contemporary canon.
Download or read book Leaving Cheyenne written by Larry McMurtry and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If Chaucer were a Texan writing today . . . this is how he would have written and this is how he would have felt.”— New York Times In Leaving Cheyenne (1963), which anticipates Lonesome Dove more than any other early novel, the stark realities of the American West play out in a mesmerizing love triangle. Stubborn rancher Gideon Fry, resilient Molly Taylor, and awkward ranch hand Johnny McCloud struggle with love and jealousy as the years pass.
Download or read book Thalia A Texas Trilogy written by Larry McMurtry and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Entertainment Weekly’s "Most Beautiful Books of the Year" The renaissance of Larry McMurtry, “an alchemist who converts the basest materials to gold” (New York Times Book Review), continues with the publication of Thalia. Larry McMurtry burst onto the American literary scene with a force that would forever redefine how we perceive the American West. His first three novels— Horseman, Pass By (1961),* Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show (1966)— all set in the north Texas town of Thalia after World War II, are collected here for the first time. In this trilogy, McMurtry writes tragically of men and women trying to carve out an existence on the plains, where the forces of modernity challenge small- town American life. From a cattleranch rivalry that confirms McMurtry’s “full- blooded Western genius” (Publishers Weekly) to a love triangle involving a cowboy, his rancher boss and wife, and finally to the hardscrabble citizens of an oil- patch town trying to keep their only movie house alive, McMurtry captures the stark realities of the West like no one else. With a new introduction, Thalia emerges as an American classic that celebrates one of our greatest literary masters. *Just named in 2017 by Publishers Weekly the #1 Western novel worthy of rediscovery.
Download or read book Horseman Pass By written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lonesome Dove comes the novel that became the basis for the film Hud, starring Paul Newman. In classic Western style Larry McMurtry illustrates the timeless conflict between the modernity and the Old West through the eyes of Texas cattlemen. Horseman, Pass By tells the story of Homer Bannon, an old-time cattleman who epitomizes the frontier values of honesty and decency, and Hud, his unscrupulous stepson. Caught in the middle is the narrator, Homer's young grandson Lonnie, who is as much drawn to his grandfather’s strength of character as he is to Hud's hedonism and materialism. When first published in 1961, Horseman, Pass By caused a sensation in Texas literary circles for its stark, realistic portrayal of the struggles of a changing West in the years following World War II. Never before had a writer managed to encapsulate its environment with such unsentimental realism. Today, memorable characters, powerful themes, and illuminating detail make Horseman, Pass By vintage McMurtry.
Download or read book The Evening Star written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The earthy humor and the powerful emotional impact that set McMurtry's Terms of Endearment apart from other novels now rise to brilliant new heights with The Evening Star. McMurtry takes us deep into the heart of Texas, and deep into the heart of one of the most memorable characters of our time, Aurora Greenway—along with her family, friends, and lovers—in a tale of affectionate wit, bittersweet tenderness, and the unexpected turns that life can take. This is Larry McMurtry at his very best: warm, compassionate, full of comic invention, an author so attuned to the feelings, needs, and desires of his characters that they possess a reality unique in American fiction.
Download or read book All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers A Novel written by Larry McMurtry and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young writer hits the dusty Texas highway for the California coast in this “brilliant . . . funny and dangerously tender” (Time) tale of art and sacrifice. Hailed as one of “the best novels ever set in America’s fourth largest city” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry’s “comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension” (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the “mundane happiness” of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, “El Chevy,” bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable characters joins the naïve troubadour’s pilgrimage to California and back to Texas, including a cruel, long-legged beauty; an appealing screenwriter; a randy college professor; and a genuine if painfully “normal” friend. Since the novel’s publication in 1972, Danny Deck has “been far more successful at getting loved by readers than he ever was at getting loved by the women in his life” (McMurtry), a testament to the author’s incomparable talent for capturing the essential tragicomedy of the human experience.
Download or read book Comanche Moon written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2000-10-17 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the bitter frontier strife between Texans and the Comanche, Texas Rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call battle Buffalo Hump, the enigmatic war chief, and Gus' long-time nemesis, Blue Duck.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. 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. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. 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. 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. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.
Download or read book Crazy Horse written by Kingsley M. Bray and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2011-11-19 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crazy Horse was as much feared by tribal foes as he was honored by allies. His war record was unmatched by any of his peers, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Yet so much about him is unknown or steeped in legend. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life corrects older, idealized accounts—and draws on a greater variety of sources than other recent biographies—to expose the real Crazy Horse: not the brash Sioux warrior we have come to expect but a modest, reflective man whose courage was anchored in Lakota piety. Kingsley M. Bray has plumbed interviews of Crazy Horse’s contemporaries and consulted modern Lakotas to fill in vital details of Crazy Horse’s inner and public life. Bray places Crazy Horse within the rich context of the nineteenth-century Lakota world. He reassesses the war chief’s achievements in numerous battles and retraces the tragic sequence of misunderstandings, betrayals, and misjudgments that led to his death. Bray also explores the private tragedies that marred Crazy Horse’s childhood and the network of relationships that shaped his adult life. To this day, Crazy Horse remains a compelling symbol of resistance for modern Lakotas. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life is a singular achievement, scholarly and authoritative, offering a complete portrait of the man and a fuller understanding of his place in American Indian and United States history.
Download or read book The Last Kind Words Saloon A Novel written by Larry McMurtry and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Seattle Times The Last Kind Words Saloon marks the triumphant return of Larry McMurtry to the nineteenth-century West of his classic Lonesome Dove. In this "comically subversive work of fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Larry McMurtry chronicles the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Tracing their legendary friendship from the settlement of Long Grass, Texas, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, The Last Kind Words Saloon finds Wyatt and Doc living out the last days of a cowboy lifestyle that is already passing into history. In his stark and peerless prose McMurtry writes of the myths and men that live on even as the storied West that forged them disappears. Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of our most original American writers.
Download or read book Somebody s Darling written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning Larry McMurtry writes like no one else about the American frontier—though in Somebody's Darling, the frontier lies farther west, in Hollywood, and his subject is the strange world of the movies—those who make them and those who play in them. Somebody's Darling is the story of the fortunes of Jill Peel. Jill is brilliant, talented, and disciplined, and one of the best female directors in Hollywood, or anywhere else. She's got it all together, except where the men in her life are concerned: Joe Percy and Owen Oarson. Joe is a womanizing, aging screenwriter, cheerfully cynical about life, love, and art, and the pursuit of all three. But he'd rather be left alone with the young, oversexed wives of studio moguls. Owen is an ex-Texas football player and tractor salesman turned studio climber and sexual athlete. He'll climb from bed to bed in pursuit of his starry goal: to be a movie producer. Between the two of them and a cast of Hollywood's most unforgettable eccentrics, Jill Peel tries to create some movie magic. Full of all the grit and warmth of his best work, Somebody's Darling is Larry McMurtry's deft and raunchy romp behind the scenes of America's own unique Babel: Hollywood.
Download or read book Moving on written by Larry McMurtry and published by Touchstone. This book was released on 1987 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Moving On" is a big, powerful novel about men and women in the American West. Set in the 1960s against the backdrop of the honky-tonk glamour of the rodeo and the desperation of suburban Houston, it is the story of the restless and lovable Patsy Carpenter, one of Larry McMurtry's most unforgettable characters. Patsy -- young, beautiful, with a sharp tongue and an irresistible charm -- and her shiftless husband, Jim, are adrift in the West. Patsy moves through affairs of the heart like small towns -- there's Pete, the rodeo clown, and Hank, the graduate student, and others -- always in search of the life that seems ever receding around the next bend. Peopled with a riotously colorful cast of highbrows, cowpokes, and rodeo queens, in its wry humor, tenderness, and epic panorama, "Moving On" is a celebration of our land by one of America's best-loved authors. "Moving On" is vintage McMurtry.
Download or read book Custer written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lavishly illustrated volume, Larry McMurtry, the greatest chronicler of the American West, tackles for the first time one of the paramount figures of Western and American history--George Armstrong Custer. McMurtry also argues that Custer's last stand at the Little Bighorn should be seen as a monumental event in our nation's history. Like all great battles, its true meaning can be found in its impact on our politics and policy, and the epic defeat clearly signaled the end of the Indian Wars--and brought to a close the great narrative of western expansion.
Download or read book George Marshall written by David L. Roll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary career of General George C. Marshall—America’s most distinguished soldier–statesman since George Washington—whose selfless leadership and moral character influenced the course of two world wars and helped define the American century “I’ve read several biographies of Marshall, but I think [David] Roll’s may be the best of the bunch.”—Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times Book Review • “Powerful.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Enthralling.”—Andrew Roberts • “Important.”—William I. Hitchcock • “Majestic.”—Susan Page • “Engrossing.”—Andrew J. Bacevich • “Judicious.”—Walter Isaacson • “Definitive.”—Kirkus Winston Churchill called him World War II's "organizer of victory." Harry Truman said he was "the greatest military man that this country ever produced." Today, in our era of failed leadership, few lives are more worthy of renewed examination than Marshall and his fifty years of loyal service to the defense of his nation and its values. Even as a young officer Marshall was heralded as a genius, a reputation that grew when in WWI he planned and executed a nighttime movement of more than a half million troops from one battlefield to another that led to the armistice. Between the wars he helped modernize combat training and re-staffed the U.S. Army's officer corps with the men who would lead in the next decades. But as WWII loomed, it was the role of army chief of staff in which Marshall's intellect and backbone were put to the test, when his blind commitment to duty would run up against the realities of Washington politics. Long seen as a stoic, almost statuesque figure, he emerges in these pages as a man both remarkable and human thanks to newly discovered sources. Set against the backdrop of five major conflicts—two world wars, Palestine, Korea, and the Cold War—Marshall's education in military, diplomatic, and political power, replete with their nuances and ambiguities, runs parallel with America's emergence as a global superpower. The result is a defining account of one of our most consequential leaders.
Download or read book Hollywood written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-08-10 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One thing I’ve always liked about Hollywood is its zip, or speed. The whole industry depends to some extent on talent spotting. The hundreds of agents, studio executives, and producers who roam the streets of the city of Los Angeles let very little in the way of talent slip by." In this final installment of the memoir trilogy that includes Books and Literary Life, Larry McMurtry, "the master of the show-stopping anecdote" (O, The Oprah Magazine) turns his own keenly observing eye to his rollercoaster romance with Hollywood. As both the creator of numerous works successfully adapted by others for film and television (Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, and the Emmy-nominated The Murder of Mary Phagan) and the author of screenplays including The Last Picture Show (with Peter Bogdanovich), Streets of Laredo, and the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain (both with longtime writing partner Diana Ossana), McMurtry has seen all the triumphs and frustrations that Hollywood has to offer a writer, and he recounts them in a voice unfettered by sentiment and yet tinged with his characteristic wry humor. Beginning with his sudden entrée into the world of film as the author of Horseman, Pass By—adapted into the Paul Newman–starring Hud in 1963—McMurtry regales readers with anecdotes that find him holding hands with Cybill Shepherd, watching Jennifer Garner’s audition tape, and taking lunch at Chasen’s again and again. McMurtry fans and Hollywood hopefuls alike will find much to cherish in these pages, as McMurtry illuminates life behind the scenes in America’s dream factory.
Download or read book Anything for Billy written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning "absolute master of 'Western' prose," comes McMurtry's electrifying take on the classic tale of Billy the Kid, the teenage outlaw of the American Old West. The first time I saw Billy, he came walking out of a cloud... Welcome to the wild, hot-blooded adventures of Billy the Kid, the American West's most legendary outlaw. Larry McMurtry takes us on a hell-for-leather journey with Billy and his friends as they ride, drink, love, fight, shoot, and escape their way into the shining memories of Western myth. Surrounded by a splendid cast of characters that only Larry McMurtry could create, Billy charges headlong toward his fate, to become in death the unforgettable desperado he aspires to be in life. Not since Lonesome Dove has there been such a rich, exciting novel about the cowboys, Indians, and gunmen who live at the blazing heart of the American dream.
Download or read book The Sabres of Paradise written by Lesley Blanch and published by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. This book was released on 2004-11-13 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Caucasus--a region of supreme natural beauty and fiercely proud warriors--has throughout history been characterized by violence and turmoil. During the Great Caucasus War of 1834-1859, the warring mountain tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya united under the charismatic leadership of the Muslim chieftain Imam Shamyl, the "Lion of Daghestan", and held at bay the invading Russian army for nearly 25 years. Lesley Blanch vividly recounts the epic story of their heroic and bloody struggle for freedom and the life of a man still legendary in the Caucasus.
