An icon of American letters, Larry McMurtry counts a Pulitzer Prize and a screenwriting Academy Award among his numerous accomplishments. Here, Danny Deck-Emma’s friend from Terms of Endearment-is a promising young writer losing touch with his talent and drifting from Texas to California because “that’s where all the writers are.” Set in the early 1960s, this is an uproarious (and raunchy) satire of life in Texas and California and a true American portrait of an artist as a young man.

Larry McMurtry returns to the Old West in a fast-moving, comic tale about a woman determined to conquer anything that stands in the way of an ultimate confrontation with her wayward husband.

In his first historical novel in ten years, Larry McMurtry introduces Mary Margaret, a nineteenth-century version of the formidable, unforgettable Aurora Greenway of Terms of Endearment. Mary Margaret is married to Dickie, who hauls supplies to the forts along the Oregon Trail and, as Mary Margaret rightly suspects, enjoys the pleasures of other women across most of the frontier. Fed up and harboring a secret love of her own, she collects the kids; her brother-in-law, Seth; her sister, Rosie; and her cranky father and makes her way westward to settle things once and for all.

The story of their trek across the country is packed with the elements McMurtry fans love: encounters with historical figures such as Wild Bill Hickock and U.S. Army colonel Fetterman (whose incompetence resulted in one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of the American West), larger-than-life fictional characters who join the family on their journey, and confrontations with nature at its wildest. With characters based on actual traders of the Old Santa Fe Trail, Boone’s Lick is vintage McMurtry.

A strange old woman caked in Montana mud pens a letter to her darling daughter back East‚Äîthe writer’s name is Martha Jane, but her friends call her Calamity…

I am the Wild West, no show about it. I was one of the people who kept it wild.

Larry McMurtry returns to the territory of his Pulitzer Prize‚Äìwinning masterwork, Lonesome Dove, to sing the song of Calamity Jane’s last ride. In a letter to her daughter back East, Martha Jane is not shy about her own importance. Martha Jane‚Äîbetter known as Calamity‚Äîis just one of the handful of aging legends who travel to London as part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show in Buffalo Girls. As he describes the insatiable curiosity of Calamity’s Indian friend No Ears, Annie Oakley’s shooting match with Lord Windhouveren, and other highlights of the tour, McMurtry turns the story of a band of hardy, irrepressible survivors into an unforgettable portrait of love, fellowship, dreams, and heartbreak.

In this tale of high-spirited and terrifying adventure, set against the background of the West that Larry McMurtry has made his own, By Sorrow’s River is an epic in its own right with the return of the formidable, young Tasmin Berrybender.

At the heart of this third volume of his Western saga remains the beautiful and determined Tasmin Berrybender, now married to the “Sin Killer” and mother to their young son, Monty. By Sorrow’s River continues the Berrybender party’s trail across the endless Great Plains of the West toward Santa Fe, where they intend, those who are lucky enough to survive the journey, to spend the winter. They meet up with a vast array of characters from the history of the West: Kit Carson, the famous scout; Le Partezon, the fearsome Sioux war chief; two aristocratic Frenchmen, whose eccentric aim is to cross the Great Plains by hot air balloon; a party of slavers; a band of raiding Pawnee; and many other astonishing characters who prove, once again, that the rolling, grassy plains are not, in fact, nearly as empty of life as they look. Most of what is there is dangerous and hostile, even when faced with Tasmin’s remarkable, frosty sangfroid. She is one of the strongest and most interesting of Larry McMurtry’s characters, and she stands at the center of this powerful and ambitious novel of the West.

The epic four-volume cycle that began with Larry McMurty’s Pulitzer Prize‚Äìwinning masterpiece, Lonesome Dove, is completed with this brilliant and haunting novel‚Äîa capstone in a mighty tradition of storytelling.

Texas Rangers August McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, now in their middle years, are just beginning to deal with the enigmas of the adult heart—Gus with his great love, Clara Forsythe; and Call with Maggie Tilton, the young whore who loves him. Two proud but very different men, they enlist with a Ranger troop in pursuit of Buffalo Hump, the great Comanche war chief; Kicking Wolf, the celebrated Comanche horse thief; and a deadly Mexican bandit king with a penchant for torture.

Comanche Moon joins the twenty-year time line between Dead Man’s Walk and Lonesome Dove, following beloved heroes Gus and Call and their comrades-in-arms‚ÄîDeets, Jake Spoon, and Pea Eye Parker‚Äîin their bitter struggle to protect an advancing Western frontier against the defiant Comanches, courageously determined to defend their territory and their way of life.

At once vividly imagined and unflinchingly realistic, Comanche Moon is a sweeping, heroic adventure full of tragedy, cruelty, courage, honor and betrayal, and the culmination of Larry McMurty’s peerless vision of the American West.

Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry crafts works synonymous with the grandeur and beauty of the American West. Here McMurtry turns his attention to George A. Custer, a complex man who has captivated historians for over a century. From graduating last in his class at West Point to leading the ill-fated 7th Cavalry in the attack at Little Bighorn, Custer forged a legacy- still very much alive today- as one of the West’s most enduring historical figures.

The first of Larry McCurtry’s Pulitzer Prize‚Äìwinning Lonesome Dove tetralogy, showcasing McCurtry’s talent for breathing new life into the vanished American West through two of the most memorable heroes in contemporary fiction: Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call.

As young Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call (“Gus” and “Call” for short) have much to learn about survival in a land fraught with perils: not only the blazing heat and raging tornadoes, roiling rivers and merciless Indians, but also the deadly whims of soldiers. On their first expeditions‚Äîled by incompetent officers and accompanied by the robust, dauntless whore known as the Great Western‚Äîthey will face death at the hands of the cunning Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump and the silent Apache Gomez. They will be astonished by the Mexican army. And Gus will meet the love of his life.

In this brilliant saga—the final volume of The Berrybender Narratives and an epic in its own right—Larry McMurtry lives up to his reputation for delivering novels with “wit, grace, and more than a hint of what might be called muscular nostalgia, fit together to create a panoramic portrait of the American West” (The New York Times Book Review).

As this finale opens, Tasmin and her family are under irksome, though comfortable, arrest in Mexican Santa Fe. Her father, the eccentric Lord Berrybender, is planning to head for Texas with his whole family and his retainers, English, American, and Native American. Tasmin, who would once have followed her husband, Jim Snow, anywhere, is no longer even sure she likes him, or knows where to go to next. Neither does anyone else—even Captain Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, is puzzled by the great changes sweeping over the West, replacing Native Americans and buffalo with towns and farms.

In the meantime, Jim Snow, accompanied by Kit Carson, journeys to New Orleans, where he meets up with a muscular giant named Juppy, who turns out to be one of Lord Berrybender’s many illegitimate offspring, and in whose company they make their way back to Santa Fe. But even they are unable to prevent the Mexicans from carrying the Berrybender family on a long and terrible journey across the desert to Vera Cruz.

Starving, dying of thirst, and in constant, bloody battle with slavers pursuing them, the Berrybenders finally make their way to civilization—if New Orleans of the time can be called that—where Jim Snow has to choose between Tasmin and the great American plains, on which he has lived all his life in freedom, and where, after all her adventures, Tasmin must finally decide where her future lies.

With a cast of characters that includes almost every major real-life figure of the West, Folly and Glory is a novel that represents the culmination of a great and unique four-volume saga of the early days of the West; it is one of Larry McMurtry’s finest achievements.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry follows up Books and Literary Life with this final installment in his memoir trilogy. Tinged with his wry humor and Texas swagger, Hollywood is McMurtry’s anecdote-filled take on Tinseltown from the year his Horseman, Pass By was adapted into Hud (1963) to the year he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain (2005).

In addition to his 29 books, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry is credited on dozens of screenplays-including the Academy Award-winning Brokeback Mountain. Horseman, Pass By is a post-World War II classic first published in 1961 and later made into a feature film. Cattleman Homer Bannon is a walking advertisement for traditional, old-frontier morals-in contrast to his stepson, Hud. Homer’s grandson Lonnie is torn between emotions for his father and grandfather as he struggles to define his own identity.

As the world enters a new century, three teenagers forge a future for themselves on the wild Texas grasslands: Gideon Fry, torn between going his way and following his father’s footsteps; Johnny McCloud, whose restless spirit finds its solace traversing an open range; and Molly Taylor, the woman they both love. Rugged, bold and volatile, the three of them come of age in this tender and intimate novel of the heart.

In Literary Life, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry opens up about the triumphs and trials of his abundant literary career. Relaying his early interest in writing that began with a creative writing class at Rice University, to a career that boasts over 40 novels and an Academy Award-winning screenplay, this intimate portrait of the author offers a glimpse into an intelligent, honest and undeniably profound voice in contemporary American Literature.

Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author Larry McMurtry is one of America’s best novelists. Several of his books are modern classics, including Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning motion picture. Now McMurtry delivers a funny yet sobering road trip novel reminiscent of Thelma and Louise and featuring two of the most original women to appear in fiction for quite some time. Maggie runs a group that dubs voices for movies. She spends much of her time fending off her three pushy daughters, and gets her kicks with her far older Sicilian lover. Connie, on the other hand, has a taste for younger men. These two best friends are getting past their prime, which is why they plan to have one last great adventure. But on the road from Texas to California and back, the women get caught up in events beyond their control. Packing a .38 Special, they blaze their trail across the Southwest, bumping into one zany character after another.

Here are the true stories of the West’s most terrible massacres-Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans and, in the case of the currently hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children.
McMurtry’s evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small-Custer’s defeat in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than two hundred dead-yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horror they had committed. Nephi Johnson, one of the participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, died crying “Blood, blood, blood!”
McMurtry’s powerful prose captures the gritty essence of this tumultuous and pivotal era, and the fascinating and remarkable men and women-American and Indian, celebrated and forgotten-who shaped the West, and would kill to keep it.

In 1999, Larry McMurtry, whose wanderlust had been previously restricted to the roads of America, set off for a trip to the paradise of Tahiti and the South Sea Islands in an old-fashioned tub of a cruise boat, at a time when his mother was slipping toward a paradise of her own. Opening up to her son in her final days, his mother makes a stunning revelation of a previous marriage and sends McMurtry on a journey of an entirely different kind. 

Vividly, movingly, and with infinite care, McMurtry paints a portrait of his parents’ marriage against the harsh, violent landscape of west Texas. It is their roots — laced with overtones of hard work, bitter disappointment, and the Puritan ethic — that McMurtry challenges by traveling to Tahiti, a land of lush sensuality and easy living. With fascinating detail, shrewd observations, humorous pathos, and unforgettable characters, he begins to answer some of the questions of what paradise is, whether it exists, and how different it is from life in his hometown of Archer City, Texas.

Legendary author Larry McMurtry-who has both a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award to his credit-concludes the story of Duane Moore, who first appeared in the 1966 classic The Last Picture Show. Fast approaching 70, Duane is adjusting to the loneliness of retirement. Then things get stirred up when a billionaire heiress moves to the area and opens a rhinoceros sanctuary. “. a top-shelf blend of wit and insight, sharply defined characters and to-the-point prose.”-Publishers Weekly, starred review

As he crisscrosses America — driving in search of the present, the past, and himself — Larry McMurtry shares his fascination with this nation’s great trails and the culture that has developed around them. 

Ever since he was a boy growing up in Texas only a mile from Highway 281, Larry McMurtry has felt the pull of the road. His town was thoroughly landlocked, making the highway his “river, its hidden reaches a mystery and an enticement. I began my life beside it and I want to drift down the entire length of it before I end this book.” 

In Roads, McMurtry embarks on a cross-country trip where his route is also his destination. As he drives, McMurtry reminisces about the places he’s seen, the people he’s met, and the books he’s read, including more than 3,000 books about travel. He explains why watching episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show might be the best way to find joie de vivre in Minnesota; the scenic differences between Route 35 and I-801; which vigilantes lived in Montana and which hailed from Idaho; and the history of Lewis and Clark, Sitting Bull, and Custer that still haunts Route 2 today. 

As it makes its way from South Florida to North Dakota, from eastern Long Island to Oregon, Roads is travel writing at its best.

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Larry McMurtry comes the first in a four-volume epic journey through the early American frontier, featuring the Berrybender family, English nobility adrift in the American West in the 1830s.

It is 1830, and the Berrybender family‚Äîrich, aristocratic, English, and hopelessly out of place‚Äîis on its way up the Missouri River to see the untamed West as it begins to open up. Lord and Lady Berrybender have abandoned their home in England to broaden the horizons for themselves and their three children. With irascible determination‚Äîand a great deal of outright chaos‚Äîthe party experiences both the awesome majesty and brutal savagery of the unexplored land, from buffalo stampedes and natural disasters to Indian raids and encounters with frontiersmen and trappers, explorers, pioneers, and one part-time preacher known as “the Sin Killer.” Sin Killer, the strong, silent Westerner, captures the heart of the strong-willed, beautiful Berrybender daughter, Tasmin. But their fast developing relationship can only bring more trouble for the Berrybender’s.

Packed with breathtaking adventure, charming romance, and a sense of humor stretching clear over the horizon, Sin Killer is a truly unique view of the West that could only come from the boundless skill and imagination of Larry McMurtry.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Larry McMurtry comes the final book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy—an exhilarating tale of legend and heroism, Streets of Laredo is classic Texas and Western literature at its finest.

Captain Woodrow Call, August McCrae’s old partner, is now a bounty hunter hired to track down a brutal young Mexican bandit. Riding with Call are an Eastern city slicker, a witless deputy, and one of the last members of the Hat Creek outfit, Pea Eye Parker, now married to Lorena‚Äîonce Gus McCrae’s sweetheart. This long chase leads them across the last wild stretches of the West into a hellhole known as Crow Town and, finally, into the vast, relentless plains of the Texas frontier.

Winner of the 2007 Audie Award for Solo Narration—Female and Finalist for Fiction, Unabridged

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove comes a big, brilliant, unputdownable saga of the Old West, told in the spunky courageous voice of a young woman named Nellie Courtright.

When twenty-two-year-old Nellie Courtright and her teenage brother Jackson are unexpectedly orphaned by their father‚Äôs suicide on his new and unprosperous ranch, they make their way to the nearby town of Rita Blanca, where Jackson manages to secure a job as a sheriff’s deputy, while Nellie, ever resourceful, becomes the town‚Äôs telegrapher.

Together, they inadvertently put Rita Blanca on the map when young Jackson succeeds in shooting down all six of the ferocious Yazee brothers in a gunfight that brings him lifelong fame, but which he can never repeat because his success came purely out of luck.

Propelled by her own energy and commonsense approach to life, Nellie meets and almost conquers the heart of Buffalo Bill, the man she will love most in her long life, and goes on to meet, and witness the exploits of, Billy the Kid, the Earp brothers, and Doc Holliday. She even gets a ringside seat at the Battle at the O.K. Corral, the most famous gunfight in Western history, and eventually lives long enough to see the West and its gunfighters turned into movies.

Full of life, love, shootouts, real Western heroes, and villains, Telegraph Days is Larry McMurtry at his epic best.

A widow with a small army of suitors, Aurora Greenway loves the limelight. She’s got three grandchildren whom she adores (in small doses) and her son-in-law Flap, whom she’s not really crazy about. And there’s her daughter Emma. In some ways, Emma is all there ever was. Now, there’s little time left to say the things that need to be said.

From the early 1800s to the end of his life in 1917, Buffalo Bill Cody was as famous as anyone could be. Annie Oakley was his most celebrated protegee, the “slip of a girl” from Ohio who could (and did) outshoot anybody to become the most celebrated star
of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
In this sweeping dual biography, Larry McMurtry explores the lives, the legends, and above all the truth about two larger-than-life American figures. With his Wild West show, Buffalo Bill helped invent the image of the West that still exists today-cowboys and Indians, rodeo, rough rides, sheriffs and outlaws, trick shooting, Stetsons, and buck-skin. The short, slight Annie Oakley-born Phoebe Ann Moses -spent sixteen years with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, where she entertained Queen Victoria, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, among others. Beloved by all who knew her, including Hunkpapa leader, Sitting Bull, Oakley became a legend in her own right and after her death, achieved a new lease of fame in Irving Berlin’s musical Annie, Get Your Gun.
To each other, they were always “Missie” and “Colonel” To the rest of the world, they were cultural icons, setting the path for all that followed. Larry McMurtry-a writer who understands the West better than any other-recreates their astonishing careers and curious friendship in a fascinating history that reads like the very best of his fiction.

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.

Larry McMurtry has done more than any other living writer to shape our literary imagination of the American West. With The Last Kind Words Saloon he returns again to the vivid and unsparing portrait of the nineteenth-century and cowboy lifestyle made so memorable in his classic Lonesome Dove. Evoking the greatest characters and legends of the Old Wild West, here McMurtry tells the story of the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Opening in the settlement of Long Grass, Texas-not quite in Kansas, and nearly New Mexico-we encounter the taciturn Wyatt, whiling away his time in between bottles, and the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc, more adept at poker than extracting teeth. Now hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge-more often with a mean look than a pistol-Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way of life that is passing into history, two men never more aware of the growing distance between their lives and their legends. Along with Wyatt’s wife, Jessie, who runs the titular saloon, we meet Lord Ernle, an English baron; the exotic courtesan San Saba, “the most beautiful whore on the plains”; Charlie Goodnight, the Texas Ranger turned cattle driver last seen in McMurtry’s Comanche Moon, and Nellie Courtright, the witty and irrepressible heroine of Telegraph Days. McMurtry traces the rich and varied friendship of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday from the town of Long Grass to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Denver, then to Mobetie, Texas, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, culminating with the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral, rendered here in McMurtry’s stark and peerless prose. With the buffalo herds gone, the Comanche defeated, and vast swaths of the Great Plains being enclosed by cattle ranches, Wyatt and Doc live on, even as the storied West that forged their myths disappears. As harsh and beautiful, and as brutal and captivating as the open range it depicts, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of our most original American writers.

The second volume in Larry McMurtry’s four-part historical epic featuring the Berrybender family as they continue their journey through the West during the 1830s.

In The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry continues the story of Tasmin Berrybender and her eccentric family in the still unexplored Wild West of the 1830s. Their journey is one of exploration, beset by difficulties, tragedies, the desertion of trusted servants, and the increasing hardships of day-to-day survival in a land where nothing can be taken for granted. By now, Tasmin is married to the elusive young mountain man Jim Snow (the “Sin Killer”).

On his part, Jim is about to discover that in taking the outspoken, tough-minded, stubbornly practical young aristocratic woman into his teepee he has bitten off more than he can chew. Still, theirs is a great love affair and dominates this volume of Larry McMurtry’s The Berrybender Narratives, in which Tasmin gradually takes center stage as her father loses his strength and powers of concentration, and her family goes to pieces stranded in the hostile wilderness.

The Wandering Hill (which refers to a powerful and threatening legend in local Indian folklore) is at once literature on a grand scale and riveting entertainment by a master storyteller.

Full of adventure, grace, and tragedy, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana tell the story of two powerful Cherokee warriors searching for the future of Indian Territory.

Zeke and Ned is the story of Ezekiel Proctor and Ned Christie, the last Cherokee warriors‚Äîtwo proud, passionate men whose remarkable quest to carve a future out of Indian Territory east of the Arkansas River after the Civil War is not only history, but legend. Played out against an American West governed by a brutal brand of frontier justice, this intensely moving saga brims with a rich cast of indomitable and utterly unforgettable characters such as Becca, Zeke’s gallant Cherokee wife, and Jewel Sixkiller Proctor, whose love for Ned makes her a tragic heroine.

At once exuberant and poignant, bittersweet and brilliant, Zeke and Ned takes us deep into the hearts of two extraordinary men who were willing to go the distance for the bold vision they shared—and for the women they loved.