The triumphant return of Larry McMurtry with this ballad in
prose: his heartfelt tribute to a bygone era of the American
West.
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.
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