CANR
WORK TITLE: Larry McMurtry: A Life
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WEBSITE: http://tracydaugherty.com/
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC 2016
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PERSONAL
Born June 5, 1955, in Midland, TX; son of Don Eugene (a geologist) and Joanne Daugherty; married Martha Grace Low (a teacher), December 31, 1985 (divorced, 1995), married Marjorie Sandor, 2000; children: Hannah Crum (stepdaughter).
EDUCATION:Southern Methodist University, B.A., 1976, M.A., 1983; University of Houston, Ph.D., 1985.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. High School for Performing and Visual Arts, Houston, TX, writing consultant, 1984-86; Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, began as associate professor, became professor of English, 1986-2013, founder and director of the M.F.A. program, 2002-05; chair of the department of English, 2005-13, named Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing. Also served on faculty of Warren Wilson College, Asheville, NC.
MEMBER:Associated Writing Programs, Modern Language Association, PEN, Pacific Northwest American Studies Association, Texas Institute of Letters, English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta.
AWARDS:Awards from Southwestern Booksellers Association and Texas Literary Festival, both 1986, both for Desire Provoked; A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Short Fiction Award, 1996, for “The Woman in the Oil Field”; Oregon Book Award and Associated Writing Programs award, 1996, both for What Falls Away; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1998; three additional Oregon Book Awards; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship; Bread Loaf fellowship; Vermont Studio Center fellowship; Artsmith fellowship; Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award (with wife, Marjorie Sandor), Literary Arts, 2018; Pulitzer Prize in biography finalist, Columbia University, 2024, for Larry McMurtry.
WRITINGS
Author’s work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New Yorker, Georgia Review, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s, Triquarterly, and Southwest Review.
SIDELIGHTS
(open new)Tracy Daugherty is a writer and educator, known for both works of fiction and nonfiction. Born and raised in Midland, TX, Daugherty earned bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from Southern Methodist University, as well as a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. After teaching at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Daugherty joined Oregon State University as an associate professor. He moved up through the ranks, eventually becoming the Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing. Daugherty also founded the schools Creative Writing M.F.A. program. In addition to writing novels, short stories, poetry, novellas, and nonfiction books, he has also contributed to periodicals, including the New Yorker, Georgia Review, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s, Triquarterly, and Southwest Review.(close new—more below)
Described by Ron Loewinsohn in the New York Times Book Review as “an uneven but still impressive first novel,” Daugherty’s Desire Provoked is the story of Sam Adams, a cartographer whose ordered world becomes suddenly confused by his wife’s desertion, pressure from his boss to be dishonest on the job, and visits from a dark, mysterious stranger. Only after a near-fatal map-making trip to the Arctic, taken to escape the turmoil of his life, is Sam able to resolve his difficulties. Although Loewinsohn noted that the author tends to preach, he also wrote that Daugherty “is a serious, ambitious, highly gifted artist whose narration shifts between a straightforward, terse, no-nonsense prose and interludes of expressionistic or surreal free association.”
Daugherty’s works have continued to receive critical praise. For example, his book The Boy Orator: A Novel, which is a coming-of-age tale that takes place in Oklahoma prior to World War I, was called “an engaging, evocative novel of a troubled time” by Booklist contributor Vanessa Bush. Focusing on the life of Harry Shaughnessy, who narrates the story, the novel follows Harry as he leaves his home state of Texas and makes his way in the world, speaking out in favor of socialism until World War I effectively puts an end to the movement. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that “the robust descriptions of race relations and early resistance movements are Daugherty’s triumph.”
Axeman’s Jazz: A Novel explores the world of a multiracial woman who is looking for her father. In the process, the protagonist, Telisha Washington, encounters a series of family mysteries, and issues of race and identity pervade her consciousness. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that “Washington is a combative, compelling protagonist, and Daugherty’s dialogue-based scenes give color to … [the] narrative.”
It Takes a Worried Man: Stories is a collection of the author’s short fiction, from the tale of a folklorist and a family of illegal immigrants headed for tragedy to a story about an artist on the verge of success who is leaving his wife and child behind. Fritz Lanham, writing in the Houston Chronicle, called the effort a “modest but attractive collection” and commented: “Daugherty’s prose is transparent and low-key. The language is neither self-consciously showy or studiously stripped bare. Occasionally it rises to descriptive force.”
Daugherty’s Late in the Standoff: Stories and a Novella gathers more “distinctive and highly recommended fiction,” according to Reviewer’s Bookwatch contributor John Burroughs. The five stories and novella collected here feature people in extremis whose salvations come from surprising places. The stories deal with topics from sexual awakening to sudden violence. A grandfather, who was once a powerful politician, and his grandson, who suffers from asthma, reconcile to one other on a road trip in “The Standoff,” while a brother discovers secrets about his sister in “Cotton Flat Road.” Burroughs called the work an “anthology showcasing a major talent.”
Daugherty’s essays are collected in Five Shades of Shadow. The essays, some of them previously published, focus on the Oklahoma City bombing and the effects it had, even on those people not directly involved. Joyce Sparrow, writing in Library Journal, noted that “the most powerful of these heartfelt essays … beautifully illustrates how literature can change a person’s life.”
Daugherty turns biographer for his 2009 publication Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, in which he details the life and work of one of his own literary teachers. Barthelme was at the forefront of the postmodernist literature of the 1960s, and he was a major force in short fiction with over one hundred stories to his credit. Daugherty in fact takes the title of the biography from one of Barthelme’s early short stories. Born in Texas and the oldest son of a creative family, Donald Barthelme was just one of his several siblings to publish well-regarded works. After serving with the military in Korea, Barthelme settled in New York’s Greenwich Village and slowly began to discover his literary voice, beginning to write short stories for the New Yorker in the early 1960s. His experimental fiction was championed by the editor, Roger Angell. Daugherty makes extensive use of those who knew Barthelme best, including his ex-wives, his literary colleagues, and his close friends. He also analyzes the effect that his father, a well-known architect, had on the writing, as well as that of his turbulent private life: Barthelme was married four times and suffered from depression and alcohol dependency.
Writing in Library Journal, Anthony Pucci noted that Hiding Man is “the first comprehensive biography” of Barthelme. Pucci also felt Daugherty “does an admirable job of examining the influence” of factors in the writer’s life from his father to his emotional problems. Time magazine reviewer Lev Grossman thought that Daugherty’s “major biography … should help correct” the neglect that Barthelme has fallen into since his death in 1989. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman termed Hiding Man a “fluent, enlightening biography [that] traces the evolution of Barthelme’s complex, influential aesthetic while capturing both his whimsy and sorrow.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor was not as enthusiastic about this work, noting: “Though well researched, this is an old-fashioned, fond celebration rather than a dispassionate analysis.” Edward Nawotka, writing for the Dallas Morning News Online, was of a vastly different opinion, however. For Nawotka, “no recent book about a contemporary writer has been more necessary, or welcome.” Nawotka further observed that “Daugherty offers a coherent case for why Barthelme is important to American literature.” Washington Post Book World contributor Steven Moore also praised Daugherty’s literary analysis: “Like a knowledgeable curator, Daugherty walks us through Barthelme’s publications book by book, pausing for brilliant explications of the more challenging stories.” Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer Online, Floyd Skloot also praised Hiding Man. Remarking that Barthelme died of throat cancer at just fifty-eight years of age, Skloot commented that “Tracy Daugherty, in this excellent biography, makes us feel this loss as personal.” Likewise, Colm Tóibín, writing in the New York Times Book Review, termed Hiding Man an “admiring, comprehensive and painstaking biography.”
In his next book, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, Daugherty explores the life of one-hit-wonder novelist Joseph Heller, the author of the 1961 novel Catch-22. Heller’s opus became the defining work of a generation. His subsequent works never received the critical and popular acclaim of Catch-22, though he struggled to recreate the success. Daugherty explores Heller’s life and literary career, beginning with his childhood as the son of Russian immigrants in Coney Island. Daugherty makes the case for the value of Heller’s often overlooked satires, Something Happened and Good as Gold, and he writes of Heller’s friendships with such notable figures as Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer.
Just One Catch received mixed reviews, and critics found that Heller the writer is fully fleshed out while Heller the man remains elusive. Blake Bailey commented in the New York Times Book Review: “I sometimes got the impression Daugherty had been writing a book on the postwar cultural ethos when he accepted the Heller assignment, whereupon he decided to merge the two, and not always in favor of his nominal subject. Digressions abound.” Bailey decried “Daugherty’s tendency to appropriate the perspective of a given character—somewhat understandable when he’s paraphrasing Heller’s own thoughts, less so when he jumps into the head of Heller’s mother.” He went on to state: “Daugherty is often perceptive about Heller’s place in the larger culture, even if the novelist himself rarely comes into focus.” John Strawn, writing in the online Oregonian, was also ambivalent, advising: “The curious saga of Catch-22‘s creation, from … germination to its publication seven years later to its enduring status as a best seller and countercultural icon, provides a needed jolt of energy to Just One Catch. The narrative of Heller’s early years in Just One Catch sticks pretty close to the account in Heller’s memoir, Now and Then. But the chronology is tricked up in a vaguely Hellerian fashion, padded with flashbacks and foreshadowing, a cumbersome approach in a biography.” However, Spectator correspondent William Leith found that “Daugherty is interested in amassing details about Heller’s life and work, and then looking for patterns. … You get the sense that Heller’s life, as an author, had a funny shape.”
The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion chronicles the life and works of the seminal American essayist and novelist. Working chronologically, Daugherty describes Didion’s childhood in Sacramento, California, her early writings, her emergence as an influential essayist, her relationships with friends and family, and her later works.
Writing of Daugherty on the New York Times Web site, Sasha Weiss suggested: “He has allowed himself to fall into the most dangerous trap of all when writing about Didion: He mimics her tone. He repeats key phrases as refrains, he splices together incongruous scenes, he ends sections on downbeat prose couplets, meant to fill us with feelings of doom. Almost inadvertently, Daugherty’s depressingly ersatz Didion helps us locate the charge and limitations in her writing.” Similarly, Tara Merrigan, reviewer on the Rumpus website, stated: “Daugherty tries so hard to mimic his subject’s style … that it’s difficult not to draw a comparison between the two writers. And the comparison does not favor the biographer.” Michiko Kakutani, another critic on the New York Times website, remarked: “Readers interested in Didion would do better to reread her books than invest the time in this patched-together biography.” Other assessments were more favorable. Reviewing the book on the Atlantic website, Meghan Daum commented: “His excellent and exhaustive book … manages to be provocative without being exactly juicy. Though he digs as deeply as he can, he never plays dirty.” “What Daugherty does exceptionally well is conjure a psychic atmosphere, grounding our understanding of Didion in her child-of-the-West perspective,” stated Megan O’Grady on the Vogue website. Writing on the Globe and Mail website, Stacey May Fowles suggested: “No new ground is broken, but instead old dirt is artfully compiled and obsessively organized, making the book engaging if not revelatory. Perhaps, however, that’s the best possible approach to Didion’s life—one where we rely on her well-chiseled words to know her, and not someone else’s.” A reviewer on the Publishers Weekly Web site commented: “Daugherty crafts a complex, intricately shaded portrait of a woman also known for her inner toughness and intellectual rigor.”
(open new)In Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society, Daugherty profiles a lesser-known writer of the mid-twentieth century. Brammer, a fellow Texan who lived from 1929 to 1978, worked for Lyndon Johnson as a staff writer early in his career. Brammer went on to join the Texas Observer while also working on his own works of fiction. To support his over-working tendencies, he began taking amphetamines, starting an addition that he dealt with the rest of his life. In 1959, Brammer released The Gay Place, his only published novel. Its main character, Arthur Fenstemaker, was inspired by Johnson, and it was set in Austin. Johnson was upset by Brammer’s take on his political life, and the two men became estranged. Brammer’s addiction prevented him from producing any more significant works. A Kirkus Reviews critic described Leaving the Gay Place as “an engrossing, well-documented biography of a largely forgotten writer and his place within a quickly changing period of the 20th century.” “Daugherty offers those interested in the rise and fall of American liberalism and Johnson a unique and personal window into this turbulent time,” asserted Seth Blumenthal in the Journal of Southern History.
Yet another Texan is the focus of Daugherty’s 2023 biography, Larry McMurtry: A Life, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In the book, Daugherty tells of McMurtry’s difficult childhood in Archer City, TX, where his father disapproved of his affinity for literature. McMurtry escaped Archer City as a young man and settled in Houston, where he taught at Rice University and began writing his own works of fiction. Among them were Lonesome Dove and Last Picture Show, both of which gained popularity and were adapted for films. One of McMurtry’s later successes was writing the screenplay for the Academy Award-winning film, Brokeback Mountain. Daugherty acknowledges McMurtry’s weaknesses, including his bad temper and certain literary missteps, but he also emphasizes the importance of his work in the American literary canon. In a lengthy assessment of the work in the Washington Post, Bryan Burrough suggested: “This is the first McMurtry biography, probably not the last, and better than most quick turnarounds. The author of biographies on the writers Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion and McMurtry’s Austin pal Billy Brammer, Daugherty has a good grasp of Texas literary history and the cooperation of those closest to his subject. If his prose is unadorned and his approach profoundly middlebrow, well, so was McMurtry’s.” “Episodic this biography is. It’s also vastly entertaining,” asserted Dwight Garner in the New York Times Book Review. Garner added: “Larry McMurtry: A Life reads a bit like one of McMurtry’s novels. Elegy and humor bleed into each other. This biography contains many sentences that verge on the humorous.” Referring to Daugherty, Garner noted: “He rakes his material into a story that has movement; he’s a good reader of the novels; he has an eye for anecdote and the telling quote; he builds toward extended set pieces.” A reviewer in the Economist called the book “a comprehensive and nuanced account of McMurtry.” A Kirkus Reviews critic called it “a thoughtful yet appropriate critical treatment in the hands of literary biographer Daugherty” and “a definitive life of the novelist/bookseller/scriptwriter/curmudgeon of interest to any McMurtry fan.”(close new)
Daugherty told CA: “I am interested in the connections between public and private lives—a territory Grace Paley has explored so well—and in various definitions of ‘culture.’ I’m intrigued by what happens when cultures clash. I’ve been heavily influenced by Donald Barthelme’s experiments with language; I want to test the extremes of narrative and characterization, in light of the aforementioned cultural definitions. How does ‘culture’ shape our notions of ‘story?’”
He continued: “In the years since the publication of my first novel, I have attempted, in my work, to marry my earlier impulses toward innovation in form with more traditional structures and characterizations. This doesn’t mean my aesthetics have become more conservative; rather, I hope it indicates a growing ease with the art of narrative, a maturing outlook. New forms will always be necessary to accurately describe a changing universe; but the best fiction, I believe, will always be strongly grounded in character. Novels and stories do their work through detail and human emotions. I am still intrigued by the new patterns of speech innovative writers such as Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme have given us, but my own vision now leans toward inclusiveness and expansion, rooted in historical knowledge, along the lines of William Kennedy’s magnificent Albany series of novels. If I could write Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game as seen through the eyes of the Dead Father, I could die happy.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 1999, Vanessa Bush, review of The Boy Orator: A Novel, p. 1154; March 1, 2009, Donna Seaman, review of Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, p. 14; June 1, 2011, Donna Seaman, review of Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, p. 24.
Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1987, review of Desire Provoked, p. 6.
Denver Post, September 13, 2015, Josh Roiland, review of The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, p. 7E.
Economist, November 30, 2023, “Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry Shared Subjects and Sensibilities,” review of Larry McMurtry: A Life.
Houston Chronicle, June 28, 2002, Fritz Lanham, review of It Takes a Worried Man: Stories.
Journal of Southern History, November, 2019, Seth Blumenthal, review of Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society, p. 961.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2002, review of It Takes a Worried Man, p. 823; November 15, 2008, review of Hiding Man; August 15, 2018, review of Leaving the Gay Place; July 15, 2023, review of Larry McMurtry.
Library Bookwatch, April, 2022, review of 148 Charles Street: A Novel.
Library Journal, February 15, 2003, Joyce Sparrow, review of Five Shades of Shadow, p. 138; December 1, 2008, Anthony Pucci, review of Hiding Man, p. 129; June 15, 2011, William Gargan, review of Just One Catch, p. 88.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 8, 1987, review of Desire Provoked, p. 3; February 11, 1996, review of What Falls Away, p. 10; August 23, 2015, Carolyn Kellogg, review of The Last Love Song.
New York Times Book Review, February 1, 1987, Ron Loewinsohn, review of Desire Provoked, p. 24; March 22, 2009, Colm Tóibín, review of Hiding Man; August 28, 2011, Blake Bailey, review of Just One Catch, p. 8; October 1, 2023, Dwight Garner, “Herding Words,” review of Larry McMurtry, p. 9.
Publishers Weekly, February 22, 1999, review of The Boy Orator, p. 67; August 28, 2003, review of Axeman’s Jazz: A Novel, p. 58; August 31, 2020, review of High Skies, p. 34.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, November 1, 2005, John Burroughs, review of Late in the Standoff: Stories and a Novella.
Spectator, October 22, 2011, William Leith, review of Just One Catch, p. 43.
Time, February 23, 2009, Lev Grossman, review of Hiding Man, p. 99.
Washington Post, October 6, 2023, Bryan Burrough, “A New Bio Celebrates the Enduring Greatness of Larry McMurtry,” review of Larry McMurtry.
Washington Post Book World, February 8, 2009, Steven Moore, review of Hiding Man, p. 6.
ONLINE
Atlantic Online, http://www.theatlantic.com/ (February 15, 2016), Meghan Daum, review of The Last Love Song.
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (August 28, 2015), Deborah Kalb, author interview.
Chicago Tribune Online, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (August 26, 2015), Amy Gentry, review of The Last Love Song.
Dallas Morning News Online, http://www.dallasnews.com/ (February 8, 2009), Edward Nawotka, review of Hiding Man; (September 4, 2015), John Freeman, review of The Last Love Song.
Entertainment Weekly Online, http://www.ew.com/ (August 14, 2015), Isabella Biedenharn, review of The Last Love Song.
Globe and Mail Online (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ (August 28, 2015), Stacey May Fowles, review of The Last Love Song.
Guardian Online (London, England), http://www.theguardian.com/ (October 15, 2015), Laura Miller, review of The Last Love Song.
Kirkus Reviews Online, http://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (August 17, 2015), Christopher Carbone, author interview.
Miami Herald Online, http://www.miamiherald.com/ (August 28, 2015), Ariel Gonzalez, review of The Last Love Song.
National Public Radio Online, http://www.npr.org/ (August 25, 2015), Michael Schaub, review of The Last Love Song.
New Republic Online, http://newrepublic.com/ (July 21, 2015), Laura Marsh, review of The Last Love Song.
New York Review of Books Online, http://www.nybooks.com/ (October 8, 2015), Joyce Carol Oates, review of The Last Love Song.
New York Times Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (August 17, 2015), Michiko Kakutani, review of The Last Love Song; (September 11, 2015), Sasha Weiss, review of The Last Love Song.
Oregonian, http://blog.oregonlive.com/ (February 20, 2009), Marc Covert, review of Hiding Man; (August 6, 2011), John Strawn, review of Just One Catch.
Oregon State University Library, Special Collections and Archives Research Center Web site, http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ (February 16, 2016), author biography.
Oregon State University Web site, http://oregonstate.edu/ (July 2, 2009), author faculty profile.
Philadelphia Inquirer Online, http://www.philly.com/ (March 1, 2009), Floyd Skloot, review of Hiding Man.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (September 30, 2015), Diane Leach, author interview.
Publishers Weekly Online, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (February 15, 2016), review of The Last Love Song.
Pulitzer Prizes website, https://www.pulitzer.org/ (July 10, 2024), author profile.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (August 31, 2015), Tara Merrigan, review of The Last Love Song.
Salon, http://www.salon.com/ (September 7, 2015), J.P. O’Malley, author interview.
SFGate, http://www.sfgate.com/ (August 19, 2015), Ashley Nelson, review of The Last Love Song.
Tracy Daugherty website, http://tracydaugherty.com (July 10, 2024).
Vogue Online, http://www.vogue.com/ (August 20, 2015), Megan O’Grady, review of The Last Love Song.
Wall Street Journal Online, http://online.wsj.com/ (February 21, 2009), Kyle Smith, review of Hiding Man.
Bio
Tracy Daugherty
This writer will not turn away from what he sees and remembers, from the sometimes painful, sometimes glorious obligations of being a storyteller.
—Edward Hirsch
I know of no other writer who so beautifully can meld the ‘experimental’ form, now subtly adapted to the needs of individual stories, with the traditional form. Tracy Daugherty is a rare American writer who can see and feel the tenor and uncertainty of our time, yet treat it with rue and gentleness, with a troubled humanist’s grace of form and language.
—Marshall Terry
Tracy Daugherty was born and raised in Midland, Texas. He is the author of six novels, a novella collection, six short story collections, a book of personal essays, and a collection of essays on literature and writing. In addition, he has published biographies of Donald Barthelme, Larry McMurtry, Joseph Heller, Joan Didion, Billy Lee Brammer, and Mary Evershed, astronomer and Dante scholar. A new novel, Tales from the Bayou City, is forthcoming in 2024. Also forthcoming in 2024 is We Shook Up the World: The Spiritual Rebellion of Muhammad Ali and George Harrison. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, British Vogue, The Paris Review online, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares Solos, Boulevard, Chelsea, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, and many other journals. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, Artsmith, and the Vermont Studio Center. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and PEN, he is a five-time winner of the Oregon Book Award and recipient of the Oklahoma Book Award for Non-Fiction. At Oregon State University, he helped found the Masters of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, and is now Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emeritus. In 2018, Literary Arts awarded him and his wife, Marjorie Sandor, the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for outstanding contributions to Oregon’s literary life.
His work explores the intersections of public and private lives, art, architecture, music, and science, as well as urban life and American deserts, real and imagined. As Antonya Nelson has written, “Daugherty’s characters convince the reader that metamorphosis is possible, that beauty and peace are still available options.” He “combines the serious and literary with the funny and offbeat,” says Beverly Lowry, “resulting in sparkle-plenty prose with an ear for dialogue that never fails. His stories are first-rate.”
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tracy Daugherty is an American author. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Daugherty has written biographies of several important 20th century American writers. These include Hiding Man, about his former teacher, the short-story author and novelist Donald Barthelme; Just One Catch, about the novelist Joseph Heller; and The Last Love Song, about the essayist and novelist Joan Didion.
Daugherty is a contributor to The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The Georgia Review. His other published work includes the volumes What Falls Away (1996), which won the Oregon Book Award, and The Boy Orator.[1] His first novel, Desire Provoked (1987) was acclaimed as "impressive" and "exquisitely accurate" by novelist Ron Loewinsohn in The New York Times.[2]
Bibliography
Fiction
Novels
Desire Provoked (1986)
What Falls Away (1996)
The Boy Orator (1999)
Axeman's Jazz (2003)
Story Collections
The Woman in the Oil Field (1996)
It Takes a Worried Man (2002)
Late in the Standoff (2005)
One Day the Wind Changed (2010)
The Empire of the Dead (2014)
American Originals (2016)
Nonfiction
Biographies
Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (2009)
Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller (2011)
The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion (2015)
Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society (2018)
Larry McMurtry: A Life (2023)
Essays
Five Shades of Shadow (2003)
Let Us Build Us a City (2017)
Finalist: Larry McMurtry: A Life, by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s Press)
An insightful literary biography of the celebrated author written with brio and humor that evokes the Depression-era Texas of his youth and the myth of the American West that he dedicated himself to exposing.
Born and raised in Texas, Tracy Daugherty (he/him) is the author of over ten novels and short story collections, a memoir, a book of personal essays, a collection of essays on writing, a novella collection, and several literary biographies. His 2009 biography of Donald Barthelme, Hiding Man, was a New York Times and New Yorker Notable Book, and his 2015 biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song was a New York Times Bestseller. His work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. At Oregon State University he helped found the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
QUOTED: "an engrossing, well-documented biography of a largely forgotten writer and his place within a quickly changing period of the 20th century."
Daugherty, Tracy LEAVING THE GAY PLACE Univ. of Texas (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 10, 17 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1635-1
A political and pop-cultural view of midcentury America in relation to the enigmatic life of a Texas-bred political journalist and novelist.
Outside of Texas and certain literary circles, Billy Lee Brammer (1929-1978) may not evoke the cult recognition shared by his contemporaries, such as Ken Kesey or Tom Wolfe. In this entertaining and colorful new book, fiction writer and biographer Daugherty (Emeritus, English/Oregon State Univ.; Let Us Build Us a City, 2017, etc.) goes a long way toward elevating Brammer's status. He also offers a generous glimpse into the political and personal life of Lyndon Johnson. In the mid-1950s, Brammer started working as a staff writer for Johnson, then a Texas senator, after gaining Johnson's attention with favorable articles he wrote while an editor at the Texas Observer. Together with his first wife, Brammer maintained a demanding schedule, and he developed what would become a lifelong dependence on amphetamines, sustaining him while he also worked on his fiction. Eventually, these efforts led to his groundbreaking 1959 novel, The Gay Place. Focusing his central character largely on Johnson, Brammer's only published novel encompasses three related novellas. Together with fellow natives such as Larry McMurtry, Brammer would alter the narrow backwoods perception of Texans. "His arch storytelling style seemed unique," writes Daugherty, "because other writers had not yet exploited Texas's rich hypocrisies--the bad behavior of its politicians and religious leaders. Demographically, Texas became more urban than rural in 1950. A decade later this population shift was producing striking cultural changes. Brammer was the most sophisticated, most literary example of a Texas boy from an essentially rural background to adopt an urban lifestyle, to loosen his grip on the culture's cherished traditions, to explore the latest fashions, gadgets, art, and music." His increasing drug dependency, which overtook any further writing ambitions, served to firmly position him within the center of the evolving 1960s counterculture movement, as he explored various underground venues and encountered such icons as Janis Joplin.
An engrossing, well-documented biography of a largely forgotten writer and his place within a quickly changing period of the 20th century.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Daugherty, Tracy: LEAVING THE GAY PLACE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A549923788/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7918f21b. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Daugherty offers those interested in the rise and fall of American liberalism and Johnson a unique and personal window into this turbulent time."
Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society. By Tracy Daugherty. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. [x], 436. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4773-1635-1.)
Charting a short, peculiar life through the rise and fall of American liberalism, Tracy Daugherty's biography of Billy Lee Brammer demonstrates the confluence of networks that brought him from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C., and back as both a trusted political aide to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and a countercultural and literary icon who died too early. The rise and fall of American liberalism after the 1950s provide Daugherty's backdrop to this story about the promising but elusive writing career that Brammer pursued and his failure to realize a coherent version of the American dream. Thus, before Watergate, race riots, and the tragedy of the Vietnam War had taken their toll on the American century, Brammer burned out. His life portended the future of American liberalism and Johnson's "Great Society."
Reading and the radio provided the only ways a precocious kid like Brammer could satiate his curiosity in the Dallas suburb where he grew up. Through the radio station's mix of transgressive music and pure hucksterism, Brammer learned to appreciate a mixture of rebelliousness and shallow American deception. Thus, while Brammer lived an isolated, rugged youth, he was truly modern due to the steady and revolutionary expansion of electrification that New Deal Democrats, like Lyndon Johnson, made possible.
The Gay Place (1961), the celebrated comedic novel that Brammer wrote during frantic, drug-induced, nighttime writing spurts while working in Washington for Johnson, recalls the romantic time and place when Brammer's network of young, intellectual, and like-minded liberal dreamers gathered nightly. They celebrated their thirst for beer and a new political idealism in Austin's burgeoning political scene during the 1950s. Here, Johnson earned his mythic and divisive legacy that Brammer exaggerates in his novel's protagonist, Arthur Fenstemaker. Fenstemaker, the "seductive" Texas governor undeniably modeled after Johnson, relies on the help of his wily young press aide, whom many identified as an avatar for Brammer himself. While the book propelled Billy Lee Brammer to hero-status in Austin, it angered Johnson, and he permanently severed all ties with Brammer.
A curse and blessing for Brammer, his ironic worldview merged the idealistic and cynical sentiments that his generation injected into American political culture. While Brammer mythologized Johnson as the candidate to advance the liberal takeover of the Democratic Party in the 1950s, Daugherty explains that Brammer's experience as Johnson's aide shattered his hopes for Johnson's long-considered presidency because it exposed crass political realities. This biography offers a cultural history of mid-twentieth-century politics in Austin that can be paired with traditional political histories such as Douglas C. Rossinow's The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York, 1998), which documents the rise of the New Left in Austin and at the University of Texas during the post-World War II era.
Daugherty concentrates on Brammer's marriage to his wife, Nadine Cannon, to capture the dynamic future these young Texans imagined and the troubled reality that set their limitations. Their marriage symbolized liberals' evasive grasp for a new social and political direction. As one of their fellow travelers from the local Austin beer hall recalled, "I thought they were the ideal married couple" (p. 50). The marriage, however, never stood a chance, burdened as it was with Brammer's lack of steady employment, drug abuse, exorbitant spending, and their mutual infidelity. In fact, Daugherty's focus on Cannon's own sexual experiences and her constant demands for more support from Brammer as both a parent and a provider raises questions about shifting gender dynamics during the 1950s and 1960s. Still, Daugherty offers those interested in the rise and fall of American liberalism and Johnson a unique and personal window into this turbulent time.
SETH BLUMENTHAL
Boston University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Blumenthal, Seth. "Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society." Journal of Southern History, vol. 85, no. 4, Nov. 2019, pp. 961+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A606277558/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3ffb07b0. Accessed 27 June 2024.
High Skies
Tracy Daugherty. Red Hen, $12.95 trade paper (112p) ISBN 978-1-59709-445-0
Daugherty's engrossing latest (after the collection American Originals) focuses on the small community of Midland, Tex., in the late 1950s as it reels from severe weather, Cold War paranoia, and school integration. Troy, the asthmatic protagonist, is 10 when his mother is first stricken by a migraine during a dust storm. At school, Troy helps his friend Stevie, who has arthritis, get on the ground during "duck and cover" drills. And when the schoolboard moves to convert an abandoned Quonset hut on school property into classroom space for students from a neighboring Black high school that was damaged in a storm, local tensions come to a head. Vice principal Raymond Seaker is placed in charge of the project, which many families object to as a step toward integration. Seakervisits with families whose children have dust-storm-induced illnesses and is confronted by the community's unjust fears over the spread of diseases by Black students rather than environmental facrots as he works to carry out the plan, which the school board has approved for financial rather than progressive reasons. In anilluminating coda, Troy and Stevie reminisce about Seaker's efforts and the town's slow, staggered march toward change. Daughertya deptly creates a toxic environment where people's fears obscure their rationality and impair their judgment. The account of one man left out to dry makes for a stark, memorable outing. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
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"High Skies." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 35, 31 Aug. 2020, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A635645484/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0e84b3f6. Accessed 27 June 2024.
148 Charles Street
Tracy Daugherty
University of Nebraska Press
233 North 8th Street, Lincoln, Nebraska, 68588-0255
www.nebraskapress.unl.edu
9781496229748, $19.95, PB, 158pp
https://www.amazon.com/148-Charles-Street-Tracy-Daugherty/dp/1496229746
Synopsis: Professor Tracy Daugherty's historical novel "148 Charles Street" explores the fascinating story of Willa Cather's friendship with Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. The women shared a passion for writing, for New York, and for the desert Southwest, but their sensibilities could not have been more different: Cather, the novelist of lyrical landscapes and aesthetic refinement, and Sergeant, the muckraking journalist and literary activist.
Their friendship is sorely tested when Cather fictionalizes a war that Sergeant covered as a reporter, calling into question, for both women, the uses of art and journalism, the power of imagination and witness. "148 Charles Street" is a testament to the bonds that endure despite disagreements and misunderstandings, and in the relentlessness of a vanishing past.
"148 Charles Street" explores, as only fiction can, the two writers' interior lives, and contrasts Sergeant's literary activism with Cather's more purely aesthetic approach to writing.
Critique: Deftly crafted writing, a genuine flair for portraying memorable characters, attention to historical detail, "148 Charles Street" is an eloquent, entertaining, and thought-provoking read from first page to last. While also available for personal reading lists in a digital book format (Kindle, $18.95), "148 Charles Street" is especially and unreservedly recommended for community, college, and university library Literary Fiction collections.
Editorial Note: Tracy Daugherty is distinguished emeritus professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University. In addition to biographies of Joan Didion and Joseph Heller, he has published several novels, including High Skies, Axeman's Jazz, The Boy Orator, Desire Provoked, and What Falls Away.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
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"148 Charles Street." Library Bookwatch, Apr. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A710095676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1e463c40. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "This is the first McMurtry biography, probably not the last, and better than most quick turnarounds. The author of biographies on the writers Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion and McMurtry's Austin pal Billy Brammer, Daugherty has a good grasp of Texas literary history and the cooperation of those closest to his subject. If his prose is unadorned and his approach profoundly middlebrow, well, so was McMurtry's."
Byline: Bryan Burrough
"Larry McMurtry: A Life"
By Tracy Daugherty
St. Martin's Press. 560 pp. $35
- - -
To be a Texas writer these last 50 years or so is to labor beneath the branches of the great Larry McMurtry oak. Even now, two years after his passing, his influence and his presence are inescapable. Practically all the older writers I know here in Austin are one or two degrees of separation from McMurtry, either a pal, one of his many female companions, a target of his barbs or just someone trying to explore a niche he left untouched, which isn't easy, given an oeuvre that stretches from "The Last Picture Show" and "Lonesome Dove" to "Terms of Endearment" and the screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain."
The question I've heard lately, though, is: How good was he; I mean, really? The editor Michael Korda once termed McMurtry, only half-jokingly, "the Flaubert of the Plains." Others invoke Tolstoy; "Lonesome Dove" has been called "America's 'War and Peace.'" But while he produced several classics, they represent only a small fraction of his enormous output, and the rest of it, especially in his final decades, was seldom of the same quality. A can of Dr Pepper and a Hershey bar beside his typewriter, he wrote his famous five pages every morning, and every year the books, often sequels and prequels to his greatest hits, kept coming. Much of it was dreck. "Rhino Ranch," anyone?
There's a debate here about how we judge artists, whether by the entirety of a career or its peaks. But McMurtry's valleys are too many to overlook. In the pantheon of postwar writers, he probably doesn't deserve a seat beside Mailer, Vidal and Capote. The Austin novelist Stephen Harrigan, one of his acolytes, suggests comparing him to Wallace Stegner, another Westerner whose prodigious writings, many thought, never got enough respect from Eastern literati. Maybe.
McMurtry's journey from childhood on a North Texas ranch through teaching posts at Rice University, running a bookstore in Georgetown and his final years in Tucson is told capably in the Houston author Tracy Daugherty's "Larry McMurtry: A Life." This is the first McMurtry biography, probably not the last, and better than most quick turnarounds. The author of biographies on the writers Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion and McMurtry's Austin pal Billy Brammer, Daugherty has a good grasp of Texas literary history and the cooperation of those closest to his subject. If his prose is unadorned and his approach profoundly middlebrow, well, so was McMurtry's.
McMurtry was a bit of an odd duck, and not just because, like many creative types raised in rural America, he never truly fit into any milieu: too country for the city, too city for the country. Coming of age in the 1950s, his people were hard-pressed, and hard-bitten, cattlemen and their wives, the men wistful about the cowboy's passing, the women less so; the themes that fueled his work were those he grew up with. McMurtry was a classic small-town bookworm, a tall, gawky kid with heavy black glasses and a thick head of black hair. He did his chores, but with little brio, and was so unsuited to ranch life his parents gave him no trouble about going off to school in Houston.
I grew up in Central Texas, three hours south of McMurtry's hometown of Archer City, and I recall the moment when it hit me: Wait, I can write for a living? Daugherty does a nice job tracing McMurtry's own realization, all but living inside Rice's Fondren Library, poring over Dostoyevsky and Henry James and Cervantes. By the time he entered graduate school, he had completed his first two (unpublished) novels.
For a writer who invested his every fiber in the physical book - endlessly scouting and reselling them, even running bookstores for much of his life - it's ironic that, with the notable exception of "Lonesome Dove," McMurtry achieved far more fame from Hollywood's versions of his stories than his own. His first novel, "Horseman, Pass By," drew acclaim; one reviewer brought up Willa Cather. Although the book did not sell particularly well, once Hollywood made it into the Paul Newman vehicle "Hud," McMurtry's success was assured. The same dynamic fueled his next hit, "The Last Picture Show," a little-noticed 1966 novel transformed into a smash 1971 movie.
Daugherty's book is dominated by three themes: McMurtry's writing life, his career as a bookseller and his relationships, especially those with women. The first is solid, the second a snooze and the third kind of fascinating. After the failure of a post-undergrad marriage, McMurtry amassed a large and varied group of close female friends, including the actresses Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd and the writers Maureen Orth and Beverly Lowry. Some relationships were romantic, others eased into platonic, but the long phone calls and letters he lavished on these women, Daugherty demonstrates, were the core of McMurtry's emotional life. (His friendship with the boorish Ken Kesey gets far too much space in this book for my taste.)
Into his 40s, McMurtry concentrated on what he knew best: the tensions between Old West and new, the dying ranches, farms and small towns, what was lost as American life transitioned from rural to urban. Then, after years of demystifying the frontier, he bowed to its allure. "Lonesome Dove," published in 1985, was a massive bestseller and a landmark television miniseries. It made him an icon - the supreme chronicler of the West, and of the dreams found and lost there.
It also, it appears, took something out of him. One senses McMurtry's inspirations were already ebbing by 1991, when he underwent a grueling, multi-hour heart bypass surgery. Daugherty makes a compelling case that this was the turning point in his career. Afterward he suffered a crippling bout of depression, staring out windows much of each day, which is when Diana Ossana, a woman he had first spied dining at a Tucson restaurant, enters the frame.
When Ossana, until then an unknown legal writer, began co-authoring McMurtry's novels, many in the publishing world were aghast. They debated whether she was a gold-digger or the second coming of Yoko Ono. The reality, Daugherty shows, was neither. By taking him into her home - if there was a romantic interest, it was brief - Ossana rescued McMurtry's career and maybe his life. Once he recovered, they wrote together seamlessly. By the 2000s, spurred by Ossana, McMurtry was more active than ever, which wasn't always a good thing. The reviews of his late books could be scathing. One prominent critic for the New York Times, Dwight Garner, said that "a lot of [McMurtry's] stuff verges on being - how to put this? - typed rather than written."
If the partnership of McMurtry and Ossana left a mixed legacy, Ossana deserves credit as the force behind by far the greatest triumph of McMurtry's late career, the "Brokeback Mountain" screenplay, for which they shared an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. She also was involved in a string of McMurtry-derived television movies, not all gems. Variety dismissed one, "Comanche Moon," as "at times cartoonishly bad."
I suspect few Texans give a whit where McMurtry ranks as a writer, or whether his hits outnumber his misses. He's given us so much. He cared about his reputation, but not obsessively. For years his favorite thing to wear was a sweatshirt emblazoned with "Minor Regional Novelist." I love that. It not only speaks to his innate humility, it's a sentiment many Texas - and mid-continent - writers can identify with. When he died, I printed up 40 of the shirts myself and gave them to writer friends around town. When I see someone wearing one now, it reminds us both of the long life, and reach, of Larry's oak.
- - -
Bryan Burrough, editor at large at Texas Monthly, is the author or co-author of seven books, including "Barbarians at the Gate" and, most recently, "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth." He lives in Austin.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Burrough, Bryan. "A new bio celebrates the enduring greatness of Larry McMurtry." Washington Post, 6 Oct. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767899444/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7373ab82. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Episodic this biography is. It's also vastly entertaining."
"Larry McMurtry: A Life, reads a bit like one of McMurtry's novels. Elegy and humor bleed into each other. This biography contains many sentences that verge on the humorous."
"He rakes his material into a story that has movement; he's a good reader of the novels; he has an eye for anecdote and the telling quote; he builds toward extended set pieces."
LARRY McMURTRY: A Life, by Tracy Daugherty
When the art critic Dave Hickey learned that Tracy Daugherty was writing a biography of his friend Larry McMurtry (all three men are Texans), he said to Daugherty: ''Knowing Larry, it's going to be a real episodic book.'' Episodic this biography is. It's also vastly entertaining.
McMurtry, the prolific author of ''The Last Picture Show,'' ''Terms of Endearment'' and ''Lonesome Dove,'' was a demythologizer of the American West who appeared to live in several registers at once.
On the one hand, this biography suggests that his life was rather deluxe. He was the American president of PEN, the literature and human rights group. He ate caviar at Petrossian with Susan Sontag. When Sontag was sick with cancer, he sent caviar to her bedside. He hunkered down for long stretches in a suite at the Pierre Hotel (when in New York) and at the Chateau Marmont (when in Los Angeles). He wrote for The New York Review of Books. He had intimate friendships with Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd; Shepherd has called him the love of her life. He attended his agent Swifty Lazar's fabled Oscar night parties. He knew his way around Georgetown dinner parties, and even more so around rare books.
On the other hand, he'd grown up on a ranch. The ochre mud never entirely came off his boots, nor did he want it to. He wasn't entirely comfortable on the coasts. He was a sloppy dresser; his belts tended to miss some loops. He loved Fritos, Dr Pepper, peanut patties and Hershey's chocolate bars. He had a method with the Hershey's bars. He liked them warm. He'd let them melt on his car's dashboard while driving, then lick the goo off the wrapper. He could read and drive at the same time, he claimed, at least on the Texas plains. Once, stopped for speeding, he explained he'd been writing in his head and got excited. He was good at friendship. He liked gossip, dirty jokes and taking his slick Manhattan friends to stock car races.
The antic side of his personality means that Daugherty's book, ''Larry McMurtry: A Life,'' reads a bit like one of McMurtry's novels. Elegy and humor bleed into each other. This biography contains many sentences that verge on the humorous. For example: ''He stalked the university corridors fiercely wielding his Ping-Pong paddle''; ''The bacon cheeseburger had just been invented and we thought that was great''; ''He lived in McMurtry's pornography room''; ''The main concern was finding good bars you wouldn't get killed in''; and, about a poor movie made from one of his books, which he watched while sinking in his seat, ''It's not so bad if you only see the top half of the screen.''
This is the first comprehensive biography of McMurtry, who died in 2021 at the age of 84. Daugherty is previously the author of biographies of Joseph Heller and Joan Didion, as well as the Texas writers Donald Barthelme and Billy Lee Brammer. He is the right person for this job, perhaps too much so. If his book has a fault, it's that Daugherty tries to out-McMurtry McMurtry. His sentences get awfully loose and folksy (''a town no bigger than a gnat,'' etc.), and this quality tempted me to sink in my own seat the way McMurtry did in that movie theater. I decided not to let it bother me, and you shouldn't either, because he does everything else well.
He rakes his material into a story that has movement; he's a good reader of the novels; he has an eye for anecdote and the telling quote; he builds toward extended set pieces, such as the filming of ''The Last Picture Show'' in Archer City, McMurtry's hometown. (Half the locals loathed McMurtry for, in his semi-autobiographical novel, suggesting the town had so many dark secrets.) When McMurtry's equally talented son, the musician James McMurtry, has a song lyric that suits the mood, this biographer knows how to tweezer it in. Daugherty also makes the point that McMurtry's novels ''had to be seen as one long stream.''
He comprehensively covers McMurtry's long career as a rare book dealer, both in Georgetown and in Archer City. McMurtry compared book collecting to ranching. ''Instead of herding cattle,'' booksellers herd books, he wrote. ''Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters.''
McMurtry was recognized, during his lifetime, as an important American writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize (for ''Lonesome Dove'') and an Academy Award (for writing the ''Brokeback Mountain'' screenplay with his frequent collaborator Diana Ossana). He matters because of how closely he observed declining ways of life, and he intimately charted the national migration from rural to urban existence. But as he pointed out, in a letter to his friend Ken Kesey, the author of ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,'' his books worked because of the attention paid to character:
''For me the novel is character creation. Style is nice, plot is nice, structure is OK, social significance is OK, symbolism worms its way in, timeliness is OK too, but unless the characters convince and live the book's got no chance.''
McMurtry met Kesey when both were graduate students in the creative writing program that Wallace Stegner ran at Stanford University. Kesey arrived in 1958, McMurtry in 1960. They were competitive. But while McMurtry spent every morning writing (he averaged five to 10 pages a day, every day, his entire life), Kesey became increasingly interested in being a countercultural impresario. McMurtry barely drank and did not do drugs, but he did make an amusing cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe's book ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'' (1968), about Kesey's road trip with his Merry Pranksters.
Women loved McMurtry, and he loved them back. He had a long string of female confidantes and sometimes lovers, and these were by and large serious relationships. Unlike James Dickey, who makes an appearance in this book with a stripper known as the Miami Hurricane, McMurtry was not a serial imbiber of groupies. He married twice, once early and once late. After his divorce from his first wife, Jo Ballard Scott, in 1966, they continued to see each other nearly every day and he paid for her classes at Rice University. They talked on the phone constantly. Scott said, ''He was always the guy that drove everybody home.''
Outside of his marriages, he tended to be intertwined with several women at once, none of whom, in this telling at any rate, has a bad word to say about him. These women included not just Keaton and Shepherd but the writer Leslie Marmon Silko and the journalist Maureen Orth, to whom he dedicated ''Lonesome Dove.'' McMurtry was always on the road, there but not there. ''I had become a kind of Proust of the message machine,'' says McMurtry's alter-ego Danny Deck, in ''Some Can Whistle'' (a sequel to my favorite McMurtry novel, ''All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers''), ''leaving elegant, finely modulated monologues on the ... machines of distinguished, or at least distinctive, women in New York, California.''
The only thing that meant more to McMurtry than his relationships was his writing. This book is a study in vocation. Dave Hickey got the first word in this review. Let's give him the last one, too:
''Larry is a writer, and it's kind of like being a critter. If you leave a cow alone, he'll eat grass. If you leave Larry alone, he'll write books. When he's in public, he may say hello and goodbye, but otherwise he is just resting, getting ready to write.''
LARRY McMURTRY: A Life | By Tracy Daugherty | Illustrated | 550 pp. | St. Martin's Press | $35
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Larry McMurtry in 1968. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES BAKER HALL) This article appeared in print on page BR9.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Garner, Dwight. "Herding Words." The New York Times Book Review, 1 Oct. 2023, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767228841/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c7f38fe0. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "a comprehensive and nuanced account of McMurtry."
Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather. By Benjamin Taylor. Viking; 192 pages; $29
Larry McMurtry: A Life. By Tracy Daugherty. St Martin's Press; 560 pages; $35 and £30
The American West is a great setting for a story but a hard place to live. That is the theme of new biographies of Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry, 20th-century novelists who abandoned a life among cattle and dust for the comforts of the city. Yet the writers also shared an inability to escape their roots and returned—in fiction, at least—to the places they had left. McMurtry wrote elegiac (and occasionally bitter) stories about Texas cowboys. Cather sketched the plains of Nebraska.
Tracy Daugherty, who has written biographies of Joan Didion and Joseph Heller, has now completed a comprehensive and nuanced account of McMurtry—the first since his death in 2021. McMurtry produced memorable books including "The Last Picture Show" (1966), a send-up of his northern Texas hometown, and "Lonesome Dove" (1985), about a cattle drive, which won a Pulitzer prize.
McMurtry's family owned a ranch, but he was no cowboy: he preferred to spend his time with a book rather than in the saddle. He devoured children's books before turning to masterworks such as "Don Quixote" and "Madame Bovary". His passion for literature continued into adulthood: as well as writing books, he collected and sold them. A happy afternoon would find him browsing shelves or selling first editions in one of his shops.
Writing was a chore by comparison. "Unfortunately good writers are made in empty rooms with typewriters in them," he lamented. With a certain resignation, he made a habit of finishing ten pages a day. He set out to puncture the legend of the American West in his tales, but often only added to frontier mythology. Readers did not seem to mind much.
Movie producers also loved his stories. Novels including "Terms of Endearment" (1975), a family drama, were adapted into acclaimed films; some of the happiest years of his life were spent in Hollywood. But, during a long decline beset by illness and melancholy, he churned out middling books that diminished his reputation.
By contrast, Willa Cather left behind a coherent body of work after her death in 1947. "Chasing Bright Medusas" offers an excellent companion to Cather's writing. Born in Virginia and brought up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather excelled at short novels of the Great Plains, and later, the south-west. In elegant but unadorned prose Cather captured the simple beauty of the countryside and its people. "Death Comes for the Archbishop" (1927), set in New Mexico, was her "masterpiece among masterpieces", Benjamin Taylor writes.
She had her first taste of cosmopolitan life on the frontier. As Mr Taylor explains, Cather encountered bohemians and Scandinavians in small Nebraska towns, and populated her novels with similar characters speaking in foreign tongues. She imagined their struggles: her books probed difficult subjects including suicide and loveless marriages. Cather eventually left for New York and, like other Manhattanites, enjoyed the open spaces of Central Park.
Mr Taylor approaches Cather's work in a spirit of appreciation. A shelf of studies of the author already exists, he says, so instead he aims for a personal response to her work. That means his view is unabashedly partisan. At one point Mr Taylor defends Cather against criticism from Ernest Hemingway , who had privately mocked her for writing about war without ever having seen a battle. "With all due respect to Hemingway," Mr Taylor writes, her interest was in the nature of grief, not munitions.
You might assume that Cather's and McMurtry's work would be steeped in conservatism, religion and practical values. Yet McMurtry was immersed in the counterculture, studying literature alongside Ken Kesey and other psychedelic-drug-dabbling hippies. Cather was a lesbian who enjoyed a lifelong partnership with a woman and created androgynous characters. Perhaps they found the American West too stifling a place to call home, even as they immortalised it in print.
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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry shared subjects and sensibilities." The Economist, 30 Nov. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A774946273/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d37c7e02. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "a thoughtful yet appropriate critical treatment in the hands of literary biographer Daugherty"
"a definitive life of the novelist/bookseller/scriptwriter/curmudgeon of interest to any McMurtry fan."
Daugherty, Tracy LARRY MCMURTRY St. Martin's (NonFiction None) $35.00 9, 12 ISBN: 9781250282330
The late Pulitzer Prize-winning Texas novelist receives a thoughtful yet appropriate critical treatment in the hands of literary biographer Daugherty.
Larry McMurtry (1936-2021) once said that he was "drawn to stories of vanishing crafts or trades," such as cowboying and bookselling. The Last Picture Show (1966) was a perfect example, a depiction of a tiny crossroads town in north Texas, where McMurtry grew up, where there was nothing for young people to do and, with the death of the town's moral heart and patriarch, no hope for a brighter future. The author got out of that town, Archer City, as soon as he could, partly to get away from a malevolent father who had little sympathy for his bookish son's interests. So it was that McMurtry wound up in Houston, teaching at Rice University and scouting for books while building the wherewithal for a bookshop of his own. He frequently retreated to back rooms and moldy basements to write, and if Sherman Alexie criticized his later revisionist Western Lonesome Dove as colonial, McMurtry gave voice to many a voiceless Texan, especially the taciturn, repressed women of his small-town youth. Daugherty, who has chronicled the lives of Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion, and Joseph Heller, is a perceptive critic who isn't shy pointing out that McMurtry's literary output was of decidedly mixed quality. He would write a classic like Last Picture Show, then follow it up with a sequel--or, in this case, several sequels--that tended to make the collective whole weaker. McMurtry's vision of the disappearing frontier and of the dead-end hamlets that followed it yielded his best work (including Horseman, Pass By and Streets of Laredo), but his later-in-life projects with partner Diana Ossana on screenplays such as Brokeback Mountain will endure, too. Despite his frequent ill temper and hermetic tendencies, McMurtry emerges as a well-rounded, if quirky human--and certainly a memorable one.
A definitive life of the novelist/bookseller/scriptwriter/curmudgeon of interest to any McMurtry fan.
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"Daugherty, Tracy: LARRY MCMURTRY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A756872233/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f3524c1. Accessed 27 June 2024.