Cowboys and City Folks

Larry McMurtry wrote about the West—specifically, Texas—in a compelling way that had rarely been done before. I’ve read several of his books over the years, and I noticed something curious about them. They seemed to be written in two distinct categories: Western or cowboy, and urban. 

I liked the Western novels, especially the magnificent Lonesome Dove, which takes readers on a final cattle drive with McMurtry’s finest characters, Gus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call. The book was later made into an equally wonderful TV miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. 

I didn’t like most of McMurtry’s urban novels, and I wondered why. More to the point, why this curious split between two rather different subjects?

I discovered the answer in Tracy Daugherty’s fine biography, Larry McMurtry: A Life. One of the first things Daugherty points out is that McMurtry, raised in the little town of Archer City just north of Fort Worth, lived his life during a transition between those two eras—helping with cattle as a young man, and exploring the cities, notably Houston, as he grew up. 

McMurtry wrote about both worlds but to my eye never quite reconciled the two. What he did achieve was a feeling of loss about the retreating west, compared with excitement and some confusion about the coming one.

McMurtry, however, was never a simple writer. He created books and screenplays that successfully burrowed into the space between his two subjects—thinking specifically of Horseman, Pass By (the movie Hud), The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment. 

Whatever our opinion of the two genres Larry McMurtry explored, we should be grateful that such a powerful writer came along at the closing of an old world and the opening of a new one.