*Pulitzer Prize Finalist* *Bonney MacDonald Award Winner for Outstanding Western Book*A biography of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry from New York Times bestselling author Tracy Daugherty.In over forty books, in a career that spanned over sixty years, Larry McMurtry staked his claim as a superior chronicler of the American West, and as the Great Plains’ keenest wit...

“So many superstar Western authors. So many stunning stories. This one’s a keeper.” —DAVID MORRELL, New York Times Bestselling Author of First Blood and Last ReveilleJustice is Never Clean. Out here, it’s Personal.From the gunsmoke of the frontier to the shadowed backroads of the modern West, Rough Country hits like a ha...

"By turns a strong, clear biography (with shades of rock n roll memoir), a poetic ode to various places and people in midcentury Texas and an oral history." — Texas ObserverAcclaimed by critics as a second F. Scott Fitzgerald, Billy Lee Brammer was once one of the most engaging young novelists in America. When he published his first and only novel, The Gay Place, in 1961, literary luminaries such as David Halberstam, Willie Morris...

The New York Times bestselling writer Tracy Daugherty illuminates his most vital subject yet in this first biography of the Catch-22 author Joseph HellerJoseph Heller was a Coney Island kid, the son of Russian immigrants, who went on to great fame and fortune. His most memorable novel took its inspiration from a mission he flew over France in WWII (his plane was filled with so much shrapnel it was a wonder it stayed in the air). Heller wrote seven...

The first printed biography of Joan Didion, the distinguished American author and journalist, delving deep into her iconic life and work.In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New Yorker and New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, presents a mesmerizing account of the life of Joan Didion, the revered writer known for her unique literary style in both fiction and nonfiction.Didion lived a pu...

A biography of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Cormac McCarthy, from Tracy Daugherty, the New York Times bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist biography Larry McMurtry: A Life.Cormac McCarthy is hailed as one of America’s greatest novelists, often compared to Melville and Faulkner, and his epic western Blood Meridian is widely considered a masterpiece of historical fiction. In his body of work, the nation’s sto...

A 1950s Texas small town reels from severe weather, Cold War paranoia, and school integration in this novella by the author of American Originals.High Skies recounts the collision of devastating weather, Cold War suspicion, tense race relations, and the unintended consequences of good intentions in a small west Texas town in the 1950s, changing the futures of the families there and altering their perceptions of America.At the center of this ...

George Harrison met Muhammad Ali in 1964, when both men were on the cusp of worldwide fame. Ten years later, the two men simultaneously staged comebacks, demonstrating just how much they embodied the promises and perils of their era. In doing so, Tracy Daugherty suggests, they revealed the scope and the limits of political courage and commitment to faith in the modern world. We Shook Up the World is the story of these two larger-than-life figures at a momentous time. A unique blen...

In “Cotton County,” the first of the dual memoirs in The Land and the Days, acclaimed author Tracy Daugherty describes the forces that shape us: the “rituals of our regions” and the family and friends who animate our lives and memories. Combining reminiscence, history, and meditation, Daugherty retraces his childhood in Texas and Oklahoma, where he first encountered the realities of politics, race, and class.As a child in the early 1960s, Daugherty lived with his parents a...

The novellas and stories in American Originals c*onvey the power of the West Texas desert to swallow people—literally, or through the rituals of labor, or through the raptures of ecstatic vision, induced by blessings or madness—and people’s ability to forge connections in spite of extreme conditions. Each piece in this thematically-linked collection assumes a unique shape, whether poetically compressed, echoing (only to break) the contours of mystery stories, or redolent of the fo...

Explore the evolution of astronomy from Dante to Einstein, as seen through the eyes of trailblazing Victorian astronomer Mary Acworth Evershed In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867–1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Was Dante’s astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? ...

Tracy Daugherty’s historical novel 148 Charles Street explores the fascinating story of Willa Cather’s friendship with Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. The women shared a passion for writing, for New York, and for the desert Southwest, but their sensibilities could not have been more different: Cather, the novelist of lyrical landscapes and aesthetic refinement, and Sergeant, the muckraking journalist and literary activist. Their friendship is sorely tested when Cather fictionalizes a ...