Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry shared subjects and sensibilities
Both chronicled the American West, even as they sought to escape it
The American West is a great setting for a story but a hard place to live. That is the theme of new biographies of Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry, 20th-century novelists who abandoned a life among cattle and dust for the comforts of the city. Yet the writers also shared an inability to escape their roots and returned—in fiction, at least—to the places they had left. McMurtry wrote elegiac (and occasionally bitter) stories about Texas cowboys. Cather sketched the plains of Nebraska.
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This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Plains writing”
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