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Larry McMurtry: the 68-year-old novelist and screenwriter on leaving Archer City, working in Hollywood, eating in Tucson, and whether the cowboy myth is dead or alive.

Article Excerpt
Here we are in Tucson, Arizona, where you've been living since late last year. Let me ask the obvious: Have you left Archer City for good? That's the rumor. I should probably start by explaining why I moved hack to Archer City in 1997. I'd been living in Santa Monica--we'd produced two miniseries, The Streets of Laredo and Dead Man's Walk--and a terrible crisis came up at my bookstore, Booked Up. It was a problem with the manager, though it turned out to be not as bad as I thought it was. I had, by that time, nearly 400,000 books in Archer City, and they were not well organized. The business was not set up the way it should have been. I decided that if I was going to stay in the book business and be serious about it, I had to devote a few years to shaping up this bookstore and this book town. That process took six years. We worked and worked and worked--400,000 books is a lot of books. Booked Up is now as well organized as any major secondhand bookshop in America or the world.

During that time I wrote, I believe, six nonfiction books. Another reason for being in Archer City was that it was useful to have access to my personal library of 26,000 books. I could write the biography of Crazy Horse; I could write Walter Benjamin; I could write whatever the six books were without having to go to libraries.

For those two reasons I needed to be in Archer City. Both of those tasks were completed. So I don't need to be there. Well, I don't need to be there very much. I need to be there some. And I am there some, about three nights a month.

You haven't sold your house? That's another rumor. Oh, Lord, no. Though a lot of the time I don't even stay there. I have a wonderful house, but in the windy months I don't sleep as well. The wind whistles under the door; you feel like you're in a windstorm. So I stay with my friend Mary down at the Lonesome Dove Inn.

And you have no plans to get out of the book business? In January I bought the largest library I've ever bought: 57000 books in Pasadena, California. If there had been a moment when I was to leave the book trade, that would have been it. It was a horrible move. It belonged to a lady who had been a dealer but was mainly a collector. She had 27 sheds full of books! And I was not in the greatest of...

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