Sales of a collection of essays written in tribute to the Lonesome Dove author will help fund the nonprofit foundation Archer City Writers Workshop.
Hardly any of the sophomores at Midway High School in North Texas were enthused about reading their required assignment for the 2021 school term. Even though books had already been ordered, the students jawboned their English teacher to let them read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, his internationally acclaimed novel loosely based on Charles Goodnight’s and Oliver Loving’s harrowing cattle drives from Texas to Denver and other emerging meat markets in the still Wild West.
As the students galloped through the pages of Lonesome Dove, their English teacher and the school principal, Daniel Hutchins, could see that McMurtry’s cattle-drive novel meant much more to them than any book they had ever encountered before. The students truly felt as if the story of Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call had been written just for them.
Signed First Edition of Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove, sold at Vogt Auction on May 29, 2023 (Photography: Courtesy of Vogt Auctions).
The students were given an option: Either write a book report or re-create the story in a class project of some sort.
“Let’s do a cattle drive,” one of the students exclaimed.
So just a couple of months after McMurtry’s death in March of 2021, the gung-ho sophomores began to resemble Lonesome Dove’s motley crew of cowboys, mounted on horses and wearing Stetsons and chaps, driving a herd of cattle and covered wagons a couple of miles across the rugged plains just outside their schoolyard — about 30 miles northeast of Idiot Ridge, the McMurtry family ranch outside of Archer City, Texas.
They made a fun day of it with activities for all ages — roping, branding leather patches, bean cooking, and hot dog eating. In their own way, they had honored the man who gave them their “cowboy manifesto,” as one student called Lonesome Dove.
“It was so fun to watch these students turn a dream into something,” recalls Hutchins. Though McMurtry was several generations older than his students, Hutchins made a point that might surprise parents at Midway and other Texas high schools: “Larry’s writing still resonates inside them and will continue to do that with younger generations.”
Larry McMurtry discussing his work in his bookstore.
And it still resonates with writers and readers of all ages. George Getschow, the director of the Archer City Writers Workshop: A Living Legacy to Larry McMurtry, is also keenly aware of the titanic influence of McMurtry’s literature, shaping how we see Texas, how we see an era of American history, how we see ourselves. Like the Midway High School students who wanted to honor McMurtry’s profound influence on them by staging their own cattle drive, Getschow felt Texas writers needed to do something to honor McMurtry’s literary legacy.
Getschow had spent almost two decades conducting writing workshops in Archer City, with McMurtry sometimes sitting at the head of the workshop table, sharing his encyclopedic knowledge about world literature and urging all the wannabe McMurtry storytellers “to mount your saddles every morning and write five pages a day, come hell or high water.”
About a week after McMurtry’s death in March 2021, I received a phone call from George. As the administrator of the Archer City Writers Workshop, I knew he was itching to do something for Larry. What do you think about hosting a tribute in Larry’s hometown? Maybe we could invite a dozen or so prominent Texas writers to write essays about Larry and read them aloud to Larry’s hometown community. Do you think we could make that happen?
Larry McMurtry
Make it happen we did, and it went far beyond our expectations. I was George’s sidekick through this adventure of rounding up writers to tell how McMurtry had left his imprint on them, whether they had known him well or not.
In October of 2021, people came to Archer City from all over the country. Erik Calonius, author of The Wanderer: The Last American Slave Ship and the Conspiracy That Set Its Sails, and a frequent Archer City visitor, came from East Coast. Writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California and prolific author and critic Geoff Dyer came from the West. Native American author Ron Querry heard about the gathering and drove in from New Mexico. Revered Texas writer Stephen Harrigan came to pay his respects. Hutchins brought a few of the Midway ISD students to tell what Lonesome Dove had meant to them.
In all, 10 writers told a packed Royal Theater — the very movie house in Archer City made famous by The Last Picture Show — how McMurtry the person, McMurtry the writer, and his fiction and nonfiction works had influenced them. For some, it was their first time to venture out to a public gathering since the COVID shutdown.
Larry McMurtry walking his dog.
The original plan was to print the essays and distribute them to the audience. But Harrigan had a better idea. He put George and me in touch with his editor at the University of Texas Press. The small tribute grew to 38 essays by notable writers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright; McMurtry’s writing partner, Diana Ossana; and his longtime editor, Michael Korda. Each offers a glimpse into why McMurtry was treasured by writers, readers, and friends.
Taken together, the essays show that by his example, what McMurtry did for us was leave a “writer’s manifesto,” a body of work full of places and characters we felt a kinship with.
During workshops in Archer City, Larry often spoke about the importance of character development. His characters weren’t paper dolls. They came with their own worlds and backstories. As Harrigan wrote, “… you have the feeling, as a reader, that he didn’t make up those characters at all. Gus McCrae, Woodrow Call, Duane Jackson, Jacy Farrow, Emma Horton, Danny Deck, Aurora Greenway, Sam the Lion — all these characters were not so much created and written by Larry McMurtry as already present and alive in his imagination, waiting for their turn to be released upon the page.”
Larry McMurtry
In discussions of his book Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers, Doug Swanson would be told that not all Texas Rangers were bad. What about Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call? Swanson had to remind the audience that Gus and Call were fictional.
Others who contributed essays to the book wrote of McMurtry’s unfailing routine of writing five pages every day — typing them out on his manual typewriter. Every day. In a formative time early in his own writing career, longtime Texas Monthly editor Gregory Curtis learned a lesson listening to McMurtry type. “Oh, so that’s what a writer does. He writes.”
Then there’s McMurtry’s ability to create wholly realistic worlds that resonate with his readers. Dyer has an otherworldly experience reading Lonesome Dove where words on the page disappeared. “I was not reading a book,” he writes. “There was no book and no reader. There was just this world, this huge landscape and its magnificently peopled emptiness.”
Larry McMurtry writing in his home.
While McMurtry had not wanted the cowboy and ranching way of life that his father wanted for him, it was so ingrained in him that those instincts manifested their traits in other ways. Of his love of road trips, McMurtry wrote that he enjoyed driving because he was herding all the cars and trucks in front of him. He “book ranched” and filled the empty book corral of Archer City with hundreds of thousands of books when he opened his bookstores there. And with his own writing, he was filling the pastures of the empty page — hence the title of the book. Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry.
In his essay, Harrigan sums up the deep respect fellow writers had for McMurtry. “Few novelists have ever been able to match Larry McMurtry’s work ethic, let alone his towering popularity and influence. For many Texas writers, particularly those of my generation working as soon as they set out in the shadow of his achievements, his career was both intimidating and inspiring. We could never hope to measure up, but we could dare to press on, because he showed us how.”
As the Midway students chose a cattle drive to express what Lonesome Dove had meant to them, writers chose words. Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Only Good Indians and My Heart Is a Chainsaw, may have put it best in the beautiful foreword for the book.
“… the writers in these pages, … just want to pay homage with the best thing they have: their words.”
Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry is available from University of Texas Press and Amazon.com. Out respect for Larry McMurtry and his remarkable body of work, the contributors to the essay collection are dedicating royalties from the sale of the book to a nonprofit foundation called the Archer City Writers Workshop: A Living Legacy to Larry McMurtry. The purpose of the foundation is to create a permanent writing center in Archer City for students and professional writers who hope to channel McMurtry as their muse.