David Streitfeld
David Streitfeld wrote for The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times before spending the last 20 years at The New York Times. In 2013, he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He comes to the festival with "Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry," inspired by his long friendship with the late novelist and supplemented with extensive interviews.
Many in the audience will remember that Larry McMurtry lived primarily in Tucson from the early 1980s until his death in 2021. He loved the city, the community and its bookstores.
David Streitfeld lives in the Bay Area with his family and too many books.
Awards: Pulitzer Prize
Book:
Western Star
The Life and Legends of Larry Mcmurtry
History / Biography
Mariner Books
March 2026
ISBN 9780063234888
Hardcover, 0 pages
By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West.
Before Larry McMurtry became one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, he worked on his family’s ranch in rural Texas. At night he heard vivid stories of his cowboy uncles driving herds of cattle across the plains where there once were bison and Native Americans. “McMurtry Means Beef,” as one ranching magazine put it. By the time he died in 2021, McMurtry had published forty books, won a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove and an Oscar for his cowritten adaptation of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and seen his work made into such classic films as Hud and Terms of Endearment. Now, McMurtry means great stories.
For all his fame, McMurtry was an elusive figure. He loved women but was married to his typewriter; he was wary of critics and distrustful of other men—except David Streitfeld. When McMurtry gave the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist the keys to his past, Streitfeld dug into every archive and interviewed everyone who would talk. He found that, even as McMurtry’s work criticized the old cowboy myths, he loved making up stories about himself.
Western Star reveals the real and complicated life of a storyteller who was both an icon and critic of Texas, the favorite of presidents, confidant to movie stars like Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd, friend to Ken Kesey and husband to his widow Faye, an obsessive bookseller, and the most enduring voice of the American West. More/less
