Full of life, love, shootings, real Western heroes and villains, Telegraph Days is Larry McMurtry at his epic best, in his most ambitious Western novel since Lonesome Dove.
Simon and Schuster
June 2006
Featuring: Nellie Courtright; Jackson Courtright
304 pages ISBN: 0743250788 Hardcover Add to Wish List
Not since the publication of his own beloved classic
LONESOME DOVE has there been a novel like this one --
another big, brilliant, unputdownable saga of the West from
Larry McMurtry. TELEGRAPH DAYS is at once a major work of
literature and a completely absorbing read, not just great
fiction, but fiction on a great scale, encompassing many
years, many characters, real and fictional, and the whole
vast landscape of place, time, life, and heart, which has
served for more than one hundred thirty years as the
background for "the Western" in fiction and on the screen.
Nobody writes, or has ever written, better about the West
than Larry McMurtry, and nobody has caught better in words
its myths, its often brutal reality, its overwhelming size,
and the way it captured both the imagination and the hopes
of those who settled there, only, as was so often the case,
to dash those hopes.
Told in the voice of Nellie Courtright, a spunky,
courageous, attractive young woman whose story this is in
part, TELEGRAPH DAYS is the big novel of the Western
gunfighters that people have been hoping for years Larry
McMurtry would write.
When Nellie and her brother Jackson are unexpectedly
orphaned by their father's suicide on his new and
unprosperous ranch, they make their way to the nearby town
of Rita Blanca, where Jackson manages to secure a job as a
sheriff's deputy, while Nellie, ever resourceful, becomes
the town's telegrapher.
Together, they inadvertently put Rita Blanca on the map when
young Jackson succeeds in shooting down all six of the
ferocious Yazee brothers in a gunfight that brings him
lifelong fame but which he can never repeat because his
success came purely out of luck.
Propelled by her own energy and commonsense approach to
life, Nellie meets and almost conquers the heart of Buffalo
Bill, the man she will love most in her long life, and goes
on to meet, and witness the exploits of, Billy the Kid, the
Earp brothers, and Doc Holliday. She even gets a ringside
seat at the Battle at the O.K. Corral, the most famous
gunfight in Western history, and eventually lives long
enough to see the West and its gunfighters turned into movies.
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