Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-four novels, including The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, most recently, Folly and Glory. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, and Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays on the American West (published by New York Review Books). He lives in Archer City, Texas. »

Sacagawea's Nickname

Essays on the American West

By Larry McMurtry

Explorers and martyrs, princes and poets, hucksters and scholars fill the pages of Larry McMurtry's new book on the history and enduring yet ever-shifting myths of the American West. In twelve essays from The New York Review, he ranges from Lewis and Clark's expedition on the Missouri River, where they immortalized Sacagawea in the Journals that McMurtry calls our first American epic, to John Wesley Powell's on the Colorado, from the dispossession of the Five Civilized Tribes to the fascination of Zuni for a parade of unscrupulous anthropologists, from entertainers like Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley to pulp writers like Zane Grey.

Once again Larry McMurtry casts a keen and elegaic eye not only on the often harsh truths of the West, but also on the power of western illusions, of what he calls "that other, endlessly imagined West, the West that can never be fully believed or wholly denied." These essays combine the vivid character portraits, telling historical insights, dry humor, and narrative gifts that have made him our finest contemporary writer about the American West.

Reviews

By humanizing the two-dimensional legend of the West McMurtry matures and enlarges it.
— Boston Globe

Witty and incisive.
— Library Journal

This is a profound and frequently funny book.
— The New Yorker

Larry McMurtry is as hard to classify as America itself. The West is his great subject and no living novelist, and but few dead ones, has written so well about cowboys, Indians, cattle barons, sheriffs, bandits and border ruffians. But McMurtry is also a great American reader, probably the greatest since Edmund Wilson, and his new collection of essays... is about the place of the West in the whole span of American experience and literature. This is serious work, but it is lightly done by a man who loves to put words on paper, and lets it show.
— Thomas Powers

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