The Last Kind Words Saloon, Larry McMurtry
The Last Kind Words Saloon, Larry McMurtry
List: $10.99 | Sale: $7.70
Club: $5.49

The Last Kind Words Saloon

Author: Larry McMurtry

Narrator: Tom Stechschulte, Carine Montbertrand

Unabridged: 3 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 05/05/2014


Synopsis

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 again 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, here 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. Opening in the settlement of Long Grass, Texas-not quite in Kansas, and nearly New Mexico-we encounter the taciturn Wyatt, whiling away his time in between bottles, and the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc, more adept at poker than extracting teeth. Now hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge-more often with a mean look than a pistol-Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way of life that is passing into history, two men never more aware of the growing distance between their lives and their legends. Along with Wyatt's wife, Jessie, who runs the titular saloon, we meet Lord Ernle, an English baron; the exotic courtesan San Saba, "the most beautiful whore on the plains"; Charlie Goodnight, the Texas Ranger turned cattle driver last seen in McMurtry's Comanche Moon, and Nellie Courtright, the witty and irrepressible heroine of Telegraph Days. McMurtry traces the rich and varied friendship of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday 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. With the buffalo herds gone, the Comanche defeated, and vast swaths of the Great Plains being enclosed by cattle ranches, Wyatt and Doc live on, even as the storied West that forged their myths disappears. 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 our most original American writers.

About Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. He lives in Archer City, Texas.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Brian on July 10, 2023

First of all, don't be fooled by the "page count" - this is more of a novella. It's one of those books where the publisher uses every physical trick in the book - pun intended - to s-t-r-e-t-c-h the manuscript into appearing longer than it is. I'd be a little upset, but McMurtry is such a favorite o......more

Goodreads review by Iain on December 10, 2024

A curiosity - the polar opposite of McMurtry's epic, dense Lonesome Dove Saga novels, this is a brief series of sketches, skirting over the life of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and their families, including the famous gunfight. Entertaining and pleasantly swift, can't help but being left with the fee......more

Goodreads review by Mark on June 21, 2015

I found all these bad reviews here on GR, so I bought it and let it sit on a shelf, expecting a poor novel. McMurtry HAS written poorly at turns...some quite awful (think: Rhino Ranch, When The Light Goes, Duane's Depressed, in that distinctly paradigmatic McMurtry reboot style, which always stamps......more

Goodreads review by Amy on January 21, 2018

I picked this book up at Powell's this weekend and absolutely fell in love with it. It's a short, spare, weird and funny novel about McMurtry's favorite Old West characters: Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Bill Cody, Nellie Courtright. It's told almost entirely in crackling good dialogue and just reminded......more

Goodreads review by Adrian on May 07, 2014

This was disappointing, very disappointing. It's a slim and slight collection of vignettes that would never have been published unless it was written by Larry McMurtry. The author may be relaxed about this - after all, he's more than earned his spurs - but the publishers should know better.......more