Every morning for the balance of his life, Texas’ Larry McMurtry spent the first ninety minutes of his day churning out 5-10 pages of novels, essays, screenplays and articles. Some of them became highly successful like Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, Brokeback Mountain and Terms of Endearment. A lot of his work was scorned by the critical class. But regardless of where he existed in a given moment on the popularity scale, he just kept writing. It was part of who he was.

This Christmas, my wife gave me Tracy Daugherty’s phenomenal telling of McMurtry’s life. It’s a book that in a million years, I probably never would have picked up for myself. And there’s a lot of reasons McMurty would have turned me off at first blush. For starters, he was a full-on nerd. Despite growing up on the wind-blasted plains of West Texas, he was a bookish kid that never fit in his tiny hometown. Though he liked manual labor, he wasn’t interested in taking on his father’s long failing ranch. Instead, he slid into academia as he wrote one novel after another through the sixties and started a book collection and business that eventually filled several buildings first in D.C. and later, improbably, in Archer City. He hung out quite a bit with Ken Kesey but didn’t dive into the psychedelic circus of the Merry Pranksters. McMurtry got married and had a kid but hit family therapy early. The wife left the picture but the kid stayed in the frame. The writer was loathe to settle down and bounced around geographically and semi-romantically. Sex always seemed to be problematic for him but he collected “lady friends” like a homeless guy picking up cans.

McMurtry’s days on earth had a magnetic pull for me in this retelling of his life. He represented something noble to me, something pure. Maybe it was just his vision of the world that he refused to change for editors, directors and critics. Maybe it was his chronic need to pound the keyboard shaping characters and scenes. Or most likely, like me, McMurtry had an affinity for a world out in The West that was dying or maybe dead before he started telling of its’ ending. I get the attraction to “the elegy” narrative. In a way, it frees us of the possibility of fully participating in society because we associate, have the values, of another time. It’s a way to stay an observer of things, to never have to put roots down or, frankly, commit to the human beings around you simply because you’re “other.”

In the end of his life, McMurtry who’d spent a good part of his days and his work, castigating the partially fictitious characters of his Archer City home, making them seem pathetic and impotent to changing times, their town just a dead end of a bad idea in a lousy landscape, still it was good a place as any to lay his dying head. Before doing so, at 75, he married Kesey’s widow, sold off most of his books and with his eyesight failing, stopped writing and waited for the inevitable.

I loved reading about Larry McMurtry. He was an interesting guy that knew how to work hard. You could be remembered for a lot worse.