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Also by Larry McMurtry:

The Last Kind Words Saloon, May 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Custer, November 2013
Paperback / e-Book
Literary Life, December 2009
Hardcover
Rhino Ranch, August 2009
Hardcover
Telegraph Days, May 2007
Mass Market Paperback
When the Light Goes, March 2007
Hardcover
Telegraph Days, June 2006
Hardcover
Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, December 2005
Trade Size
By Sorrow's River, April 2004
Mass Market Paperback
Horseman, Pass By, July 2002
Paperback
Lonesome Dove: A Novel, November 2000
Hardcover
The Last Picture Show, January 1999
Paperback (reprint)
Pretty Boy Floyd, July 1995
Paperback (reprint)
Lonesome Dove, December 1988
Paperback (reprint)

THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
By: Larry McMurtry

Liveright
May 2014
On Sale: May 7, 2014
256 pages
ISBN: 0871407868
EAN: 9780871407863
Kindle: B00FPT5MOU
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction

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.

Media Buzz

All Things Considered - May 7, 2014