Larry McMurtry

LARRY MCMURTRY

This month marks Larry McMurtry's 73rd birthday, and he's busier than ever. The Pulitzer prize winning author just published The Wandering Hill, the second of four linked novels about the Berrybender clan, who have traveled from afar to experience the American frontier. Booklist praises this installment as "an engrossing, exciting and sometimes heartrending saga that shows McMurtry at his best."

Each of the Berrybender Narratives will take this extended family of English aristocrats, their assorted servants, pets and hangers-on across the wild West and its rivers, beginning on the Missouri (last year's Sin Killer) and then the Yellowstone (The Wandering Hill), with adventures to come on the Rio Grande and the Brazos.

In The Wandering Hill, it's winter 1833, the Missouri has frozen over and the eccentric band of travelers must abandon their luxurious steamer to hole up, uncomfortable and isolated, at the banks of the Yellowstone. The Berrybenders are surrounded by hunters, trappers, Indians and such historical figures as Kit Carson and Sacagawea's son, Pomp Charbonneau. The sparks fly between pregnant Lady Tasmin and her husband, mountain man Jim Snow (a.k.a. the "Sin Killer" of the first book); their tempestuous relationship once again takes center stage, and Booklist calls the pair "the most compelling and memorable of McMurtry's characters since . . . Lonesone Dove."

It's no surprise that McMurtry's comic melodrama is garnering wonderful reviews, but we were surprised to learn about his secret life as a rancher. It's all part of his coming home to Archer City, Texas, where, thanks to McMurtry, the books (over 350,000) now outnumber the residents (under 2,000).

Larry McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas on June 3, 1936, into a large family he has described as "cowboys first and last." He grew up in Archer City and after high school graduation in 1954 attended Rice University. He always maintained ties with his hometown. He carved out a career as a novelist and screenwriter (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment) and operated a used bookstore in Washington, D.C.

In 1986, the year his novel Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize, McMurtry moved back to Archer City. By 1997 the New York Times was reporting that McMurtry was "buying up commercial buildings in his home town . . . and filling them with used books--hundreds of thousands of used books gathered from all over the country--as part of a quixotic scheme to turn this sleepy community into a Mecca for book lovers."

McMurtry's dream is to create an American version of Hay-on-Wye, the legendary British book town that draws visitors from around the world.

"I think of my bookshop as a book ranch--a large one," McMurtry recently told Book magazine. His friend, cultural critic Susan Sontag, told him he was living in his own theme park. One Archer City neighbor told ABC-TV: "I never thought there would be so many damn books in Archer City. But when you get down to it . . . Larry is just a good old boy."

If you're driving through Texas this summer, stop in. Archer City is two hours northwest of Dallas and 22 miles south of Wichita Falls. You might recognize Archer City because parts of The Last Picture Show and Texasville were filmed there. McMurtry's store, "Booked Up," occupies four buildings near the courthouse.