Uncovering the Untold Mysteries Behind Larry McMurtry’s Legendary Life in ‘Western Star’
The book opens with a chapter about McMurtry’s cowboy and pioneer ancestors and exposes threads in McMurtry family stories of bushwhackers, Commanches, and the vicissitudes of settling the wilderness that informed Larry McMurtry’s world view and his fiction. From that pre-history, Streitfeld traces similar influences in chronological order – learning to work from a workaholic ranching father, growing up in a bookless town, attending North Texas State as an undergraduate and graduate school at Rice and Stanford, first marriage, etc. But this is not a straight biography, and Streitfeld makes no pretense of covering it all (which Tracy Daugherty has already attempted with some success in his 2023 biography of McMurtry). Instead, he lingers longer on some episodes than others. Most prominently, Streitfeld devotes multiple chapters each to three McMurtry works that became groundbreaking films: The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, and Brokeback Mountain.
