Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and BeyondIn a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become. Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier. McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books. |
Contents
Section 14 | 79 |
Section 15 | 88 |
Section 16 | 89 |
Section 17 | 90 |
Section 18 | 97 |
Section 19 | 118 |
Section 20 | 121 |
Section 21 | 125 |
Section 9 | 64 |
Section 10 | 67 |
Section 11 | 71 |
Section 12 | 73 |
Section 13 | 77 |
Section 22 | 137 |
Section 23 | 140 |
Section 24 | 155 |
Section 25 | 183 |
Other editions - View all
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond Larry McMurtry No preview available - 2001 |
Common terms and phrases
American West Archer City Archer County began book scout bookseller bookshops bought boys buffalo cattle cattlemen century copy county's cowboys culture Custer Dairy Queen Don Quixote early Edmund Wilson essay experience fact father feel felt fiction fifty forty frontier grandfather grandparents Hemingway herds hill horses hundred Indians interesting Jesse Joe Alsop knew land LARRY MCMURTRY Last Picture Show later least less literary literature lived Lonesome Dove look Louisa Francis mainly McMurtry memory mesquite miles milk modern never novel novelist once pageant paperbacks perhaps photographs pioneer plains prairie Proust ranch house reader remember Rice rodeo seemed sense shelves soon story storyteller surgery Susan Sontag talk Texas ther thing thousand tion took town V. S. Pritchett Virginia Woolf Walter Benjamin wanted Western whole William Jefferson Windthorst wonder writing young