Larry McMurtry died on March 25th

HE WAS NO more than three, and a small three at that, when he was given his first pony. The following year he went to his first cattle drive. His grandfather, whom he remembered as a man with a fine moustache and a habit of whittling his own toothpicks out of sweet-smelling cedarwood, built the ranch in Archer County, north-west of Fort Worth, from literally nothing. He had stopped the waggon there for no other reason than because he’d spotted a fine seeping spring that would assure the family plenty of water. Lore had it that it was a place without a house, on land that had never been ploughed, at the edge of the Great Plains stretching all the way to Canada. His grandmother, who spoke little, raised 12 children on that stark frontier. All that rooting, with time, became ever more fixed in the arid Texan soil, yet the boy turned out to be not at all what either of them had expected.