In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 163149354X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This landmark collection, brimming with his signature wit and incomparable sensibility, is Larry McMurtry’s classic tribute to his home and his people. Before embarking on what would become one of the most prominent writing careers in American literature, spanning decades and indelibly shaping the nation’s perception of the West, Larry McMurtry knew what it meant to come from Texas. Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father’s ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores all the singular elements that define his land and community, revealing the surprising and particular challenges in the “dying . . . rural, pastoral way of life.” “The gold standard for understanding Houston’s brash rootlessness and civic insecurities” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), In a Narrow Grave offers a timeless portrait of the vividly human, complex, full-blooded Texan.

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 163149354X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
This landmark collection, brimming with his signature wit and incomparable sensibility, is Larry McMurtry’s classic tribute to his home and his people. Before embarking on what would become one of the most prominent writing careers in American literature, spanning decades and indelibly shaping the nation’s perception of the West, Larry McMurtry knew what it meant to come from Texas. Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father’s ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores all the singular elements that define his land and community, revealing the surprising and particular challenges in the “dying . . . rural, pastoral way of life.” “The gold standard for understanding Houston’s brash rootlessness and civic insecurities” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), In a Narrow Grave offers a timeless portrait of the vividly human, complex, full-blooded Texan.

In a Narrow Grave

In a Narrow Grave PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451608616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Writing with characteristic grace and wit, Larry McMurtry tackles the full spectrum of his favorite themes -- from sex, literature, and cowboys to rodeos, small-town folk, and big-city slickers. First published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the classic statement of what it means to come from Texas. In these essays, McMurtry opens a window into the past and present of America's largest state. In his own words: "Before I was out of high school, I realized I was witnessing the dying of a way of life -- the rural, pastoral way of life. In the Southwest the best energies were no longer to be found on the homeplace, or in the small towns; the cities required these energies and the cities bought them...." "I recognized, too, that the no-longer-open but still spacious range on which my ranching family had made its livelihood...would not produce a livelihood for me or for my siblings and their kind....The myth of the cowboy grew purer every year because there were so few actual cowboys left to contradict it...." "I had actually been living in cities for fourteen years when I pulled together these essays; intellectually I had been a city boy, but imaginatively, I was still trudging up the dusty path that led out of the country...."

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143912759X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
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.

In a Narrow Grave

In a Narrow Grave PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Touchstone Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The myth of the cowboy grows purer every year because there are so few cowboys left to contradict it. Larry McMurtry had been living in cities for fourteen years when he pulled together these essays.

Sacagawea's Nickname

Sacagawea's Nickname PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170991
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In these 11 essays, all originally published in "The New York Review of Books," McMurtry brings his unique narrative gift and dry humor to a variety of western topics.

Leaving Cheyenne

Leaving Cheyenne PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631493523
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
“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.

Gone to Texas

Gone to Texas PDF Author: Randolph B. Campbell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780190642396
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State engagingly tells the story of the Lone Star State, from the arrival of humans in the Panhandle more than 10,000 years ago to the opening of the twenty-first century. Focusing on the state's successive waves of immigrants, the book offers an inclusive view of the vast array of Texans who, often in conflict with each other and always in a struggle with the land, created a history and an idea of Texas. An Instructor's Resource Manual and a set of approximately 400 PowerPoint slides to accompany Gone to Texas, Third Edition, are now available to adopters. Please contact your local Oxford University Press representative for details.

Goodbye to a River

Goodbye to a River PDF Author: John Graves
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307773353
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.

Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 068487122X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 872

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Book Description
Bestselling winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Lonesome Dove is an American classic. First published in 1985, Larry McMurtry's epic novel combined flawless writing with a storyline and setting that gripped the popular imagination, and ultimately resulted in a series of four novels and an Emmy-winning television miniseries. Now, with an introduction by the author, Lonesome Dove is reprinted in an S&S Classic Edition. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, the author of Terms of Endearment, is his long-awaited masterpiece, the major novel at last of the American West as it really was. A love story, an adventure, an American epic, Lonesome Dove embraces all the West -- legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settiers -- in a novel that recreates the central American experience, the most enduring of our national myths. Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana -- and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream -- the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life. Augustus McCrae and W. F. Call are former Texas Rangers, partners and friends who have shared hardship and danger together without ever quite understanding (or wanting to understand) each other's deepest emotions. Gus is the romantic, a reluctant rancher who has a way with women and the sense to leave well enough alone. Call is a driven, demanding man, a natural authority figure with no patience for weaknesses, and not many of his own. He is obsessed with the dream of creating his own empire, and with the need to conceal a secret sorrow of his own. The two men could hardly be more different, but both are tough, redoubtable fighters who have learned to count on each other, if nothing else. Call's dream not only drags Gus along in its wake, but draws in a vast cast of characters: -- Lorena, the whore with the proverbial heart of gold, whom Gus (and almost everyone else) loves, and who survives one of the most terrifying experiences any woman could have... -- Elmira, the restless, reluctant wife of a small-time Arkansas sheriff, who runs away from the security of marriage to become part of the great Western adventure... -- Blue Duck, the sinister Indian renegade, one of the most frightening villains in American fiction, whose steely capacity for cruelty affects the lives of everyone in the book... -- Newt, the young cowboy for whom the long and dangerous journey from Texas to Montana is in fact a search for his own identity... -- Jake, the dashing, womanizing exRanger, a comrade-in-arms of Gus and Call, whose weakness leads him to an unexpected fate... -- July Johnson, husband of Elmira, whose love for her draws him out of his secure life into the wilderness, and turns him into a kind of hero... Lonesome Dove sweeps from the Rio Grande (where Gus and Call acquire the cattle for their long drive by raiding the Mexicans) to the Montana highlands (where they find themselves besieged by the last, defiant remnants of an older West). It is an epic of love, heroism, loyalty, honor, and betrayal -- faultlessly written, unfailingly dramatic. Lonesome Dove is the novel about the West that American literature -- and the American reader -- has long been waiting for.

The Big Rich

The Big Rich PDF Author: Bryan Burrough
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143116827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
“Full of schadenfreude and speculation—and solid, timely history too.” —Kirkus Reviews “This is a portrait of capitalism as white-knuckle risk taking, yielding fruitful discoveries for the fathers, but only sterile speculation for the sons—a story that resonates with today's economic upheaval.” —Publishers Weekly “What's not to enjoy about a book full of monstrous egos, unimaginable sums of money, and the punishment of greed and shortsightedness?” —The Economist Phenomenal reviews and sales greeted the hardcover publication of The Big Rich, New York Times bestselling author Bryan Burrough's spellbinding chronicle of Texas oil. Weaving together the multigenerational sagas of the industry's four wealthiest families, Burrough brings to life the men known in their day as the Big Four: Roy Cullen, H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Sid Richardson, all swaggering Texas oil tycoons who owned sprawling ranches and mingled with presidents and Hollywood stars. Seamlessly charting their collective rise and fall, The Big Rich is a hugely entertaining account that only a writer with Burrough's abilities-and Texas upbringing-could have written.