Literary center named for author Larry McMurtry honors hometown son : NPR

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Larry McMurtry was the winning author of the Pulitzer Prize for “Loneesome Dove”. He won an Oscar for co-writing the script for “Brokeback Mountain”, and founded a bookstore in his hometown, Archer City, Texas. The store was finally acquired by Chip de HGTV and Joanna Gaines, then sold and recently transformed into a literary center. Hope is that he can relaunch a tourist economy at Archer City centered on his favorite son. John Burnett has history.

John Burnett, byline: the lunch crowd at the Murn’s Cafe at Archer City.

Unidentified person: You are welcome, darling. Have a good day.

Burnett: an evangelist preaches on the TV in the area. The chicken fried steak is the daily special of the menu. The wages of the owner Murn remembers his famous customer, Larry McMurtry, in the years preceding his death in 2021.

Murn Salages: I fail to be here. He sat right on this stand, and commanded a cheeseburger cut in half and a piece of cherry pie.

Burnett: McMurtry was a famous novelist, screenwriter and essayist of Old West and Contemporary Texas. Films adapted from his books – like “Horseman, Pass by”, “The Last Picture Show” and “Termes of Adearment” – won 13 Oscars. The television series “Lonesome Dove” won seven Emmy. McMurtry was also a collector of voracious books. Its sprawling collection in this small town two hours northwest of Dallas has become an international attraction. To the delight of Murn, the bookstore reopened last spring, but only on weekends.

Salaries: I hope it will start to bring a lot of tourists back to our small town. It was good because people came from abroad. People came from around the world to go to the Larry bookstore.

Burnett: Two houses of houses on Center Street du Murn’s Cafe is the Larry McMurtry Literary Center, next to the Methodist church and in front of the Baptists. He is housed inside his famous bookstore, reserved.

George Getchow: We are here in the reserved interior. It was a place that Larry – it was the center of his literary universe.

Burnett: George Getchow, a former award -winning journalist, educator and now executive director of the literary center, is trusted next to the shelves from floor to ceiling.

Getschow: He married inside here. He directed in his will that his ashes are kept here forever and forever. He wrote in the morning, spent all his time the rest of the day of price books, organized books, writing comments in books and cherishing these books. I have never known anyone who loved books as much as Larry McMurtry.

Burnett: The weather was McMurtry four locations in town, piled up with more than 400,000 pounds. After his death, came Chip and Joanna Gaines of the Magnolia Network to Attack-Upper. They bought his remaining collection so that they could make picking books to store the library in their new high -end hotel in Waco. Meanwhile, Getchow was looking for a permanent house for his Archer City Writers workshop. Last year, the sheaths sold reserved the Getschow group, and it became the Larry McMurtry Literary Center.

Getschow: The goal of the literary center is to preserve and perpetuate this collection of books, this immense collection of remarkable books. It’s a – really a temple. It is a sacred place. We all feel that.

Burnett: It also collapses, like the dilapidated houses of the cowboys which populate the books of McMurtry. Kathy Floyd, director general of the center, says they need heating and air conditioning, new plumbing and a new roof.

Kathy Floyd: Water enters the ground level, and it infiltrates and leaves the puddles. The books on the bottom shelves have been damaged because it soaks up.

Getschow: And we lost a number of books that were against this wall, really very precious books that we put there because we had no other place to put them.

Burnett: In a large part of his writing, McMurtry was tough on Archer City. Just look at “The Last Picture Show”. He portrayed the stifling gloom from the life of a small town and self-destructive cowboys and the oil of oil that burned early. But then McMurtry came home. His ambitions were to transform his hometown at a single window into one of the major book centers in the world. Jenny Schroeder is a volunteer coordinator at the Writers Center and from Archer City. She says McMurtry himself has a cowboy in the family ranch when he grew up.

Jenny Schroeder: For Archer City himself, it means a lot that he was part of our city. He came from this tradition of ranch which is still alive, very lively today. And I think it shows the value of this tradition, and it also shows the value in an alternative path.

Burnett: McMurtry took this other route. Books have revealed a kaleidoscopic world beyond the ranch and celebrated the life of the mind. He wrote them and picked them up and cherished them all his life. Today, the Larry McMurtry Literary Center aspires to keep his passion for life books and to promote another type of travel – literary tourism.

For NPR News, I am John Burnett in Archer City, Texas.

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