By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West.
Before Larry McMurtry became one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, he worked on his family’s ranch in rural Texas. At night he heard vivid stories of his cowboy uncles driving herds of cattle across the plains where there once were bison and Native Americans. “McMurtry Means Beef,” as one ranching magazine put it. By the time he died in 2021, McMurtry had published forty books, won a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove and an Oscar for his cowritten adaptation of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and seen his work made into such classic films as Hud and Terms of Endearment. Now, McMurtry means great stories.
For all his fame, McMurtry was an elusive figure. He loved women but was married to his typewriter; he was wary of critics and distrustful of other men—except David Streitfeld. When McMurtry gave the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist the keys to his past, Streitfeld dug into every archive and interviewed everyone who would talk. He found that, even as McMurtry’s work criticized the old cowboy myths, he loved making up stories about himself.
Western Star reveals the real and complicated life of a storyteller who was both an icon and critic of Texas, the favorite of presidents, confidant to movie stars like Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd, friend to Ken Kesey and husband to his widow Faye, an obsessive bookseller, and the most enduring voice of the American West.
David Streitfeld is a prize-winning journalist who is publishing Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry in early 2026. The book is the harvest of extensive research into the iconic Texas writer, whom David knew well. Like his subject, David spent many years in Washington, attending college there and then going to work for The Washington Post, where he became the paper’s literary correspondent. In 1999, he drifted West, working for The Los Angeles Times and later The New York Times. He was part of a team that won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. Much of his work at the Times has been about Amazon and the rise of digital book culture. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family and too many books.
Streitfeld will be conversation with Marie Arana, who is a prizewinning author of eight books, nonfiction and fiction. Winner of an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature in 2020, she has been a former executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a guest columnist on Latin America for the New York Times, a television commentator on books and publishing, and editor in chief of Book World at the Washington Post. She is also the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Marie is most recently the author of “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority,” chosen by the New Yorker as one of the 12 Must Read Books of the Year. Among her other books are the National Book Award Finalist “American Chica,” the novels “Cellophane” and “Lima Nights,” the biography “Bolívar: American Liberator” (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and a sweeping history of Latin America “Silver, Sword, and Stone,” which the American Library Association named the best nonfiction book of 2019. She currently serves on the boards of PEN America, PEN/Faulkner, the Authors Guild, the American Writers Museum, the Amazon Conservation Association, and the Library of Congress’s Madison Council; and she has also served on the advisory council of the United States Southern Command. She is president of the 152-year-old Literary Society of Washington. In 2024, at an awards ceremony at the Organization of American States (OAS), she received the Distinguished Leadership for the Americas Award.