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 (paperback)

Essays on the American West

By Larry McMurtry

New in paperback

What was achieved and destroyed, what was made up and forgotten in the American West as the continent was mapped, the natives were displaced, and exploits were transformed into legends? In this acclaimed collection, Larry McMurtry profiles explorers and martyrs, hucksters and scholars—figures in the West's enduring yet ever-shifting mixture of myth and reality.

In these twelve pieces, McMurtry explores John Wesley Powell's journey on the Colorado, the dispossession of the Five Civilized Tribes, the fascination the Zuni held over a parade of unscrupulous anthropologists, and—in the bicentennial of their journey —the journals of Lewis and Clark, "our only really American epic."

Reviews

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

McMurtry doesn't debunk the mythic West; he honors it. This is a profound and frequently funny book.
— The New Yorker

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