The Last Kind Words Saloon

The Last Kind Words Saloon

by Larry Mc Murtry (Author)

Synopsis

The triumphant return of Larry McMurtry with this ballad in prose: his heartfelt tribute to a bygone era of the American West.

Larry McMurtry has done more than any other living writer to shape our literary imagination of the American West. With The Last Kind Words Saloon, he returns to the vivid and unsparing portrait of the nineteenth-century and cowboy lifestyle made so memorable in his classic Lonesome Dove. Evoking the greatest characters and legends of the Old Wild West, McMurtry tells the story of the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.

Long Grass, Texas. Once hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge - more often with a mean look than a pistol - the taciturn Wyatt now idles away his time between bottles, while the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc is more adept at poker than extracting teeth. With the buffalo herds gone, the Comanche defeated, and vast swaths of the Great Plains enclosed by cattle ranches, Wyatt and Doc live on, even as the storied West that forged their myths disappears.

McMurtry traces the rich and varied friendship of the heroic pair from the town of Long Grass to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, then to Mobetie, Texas, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, culminating with the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral, rendered here in McMurtry's stark and peerless prose.

As harsh and beautiful, and as brutal and captivating as the open range it depicts, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of the most original American writers.

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Quantity

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Edition: Main Market
Publisher: Picador
Published: 12 Feb 2015

ISBN 10: 1447274563
ISBN 13: 9781447274568
Book Overview: A stunning new novel from the bestselling author of Lonesome Dove

Media Reviews
Larry McMurtry possesses one of the most engaging, tempting-to-imitate voices in contemporary American fiction, a voice so smooth and mellow you can almost hear the ice clink against the glass as he talks * New York Times Book Review *
By turns droll, stark, wry, or raunchy, this peripatetic novel...will satisfy many readers who long for more from literary icon McMurtry * Library Journal *
In this ballad in prose as McMurtry describes his latest book, he paints the familiar historical characters in unfamiliar ways . . . lovely * People *
A deftly narrated, often comically subversive work of fiction . . . If Lonesome Dove is a chronicle of the cattle-driving West that contains within its vast, broad ranges a small but heartrending intimate tragedy of paternal neglect, The Last Kind Words Saloon is a dark postmodernist modernist comedy -- Joyce Carol Oates * New York Review of Books *
Author Bio
Larry McMurtry is the author of more than thirty novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. He has also written memoirs and essays, and received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on Brokeback Mountain. He lives in Archer City, Texas.