David Streitfeld’s impressive new biography, Western Star, has a subtitle that alludes to a notable part of his story: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry. Note that word, “legends.” It is more than a convenient alliterative.

McMurtry, the most famous, beloved and multimedia-successful writer to come out of North Central Texas, or indeed out of all Texas, was a storyteller first and foremost. His life revolved around books: reading, writing, collecting and selling them. And when it came to talking or writing about himself and his background, as he was often called upon to do, his stories sometimes evolved into Texas tall tales.

In this, McMurtry was like many other Texas writers of earlier eras.

Few could resist romanticizing and fictionalizing their pasts, the history of their families or the history of their state.

“It’s a Texas tradition,” Streitfeld notes.

Occasionally, other writers even tweaked McMurtry’s memories, as Streitfeld, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, notes in one chapter, “Visitors.”

In that chapter, a particularly famous literary tale from the summer of 1964, Tom Wolfe was tagging along on the bus with McMurtry’s pal Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters for what would become Wolfe’s 1968 bestseller of New Journalism, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe’s published account of the Pranksters’ stopover in Houston, however, does not line up with what McMurtry and other witnesses recalled.

The Pranksters were drug-addled during their emergency stop at McMurtry’s house, during which a young actress on a bad acid trip emerged naked from the bus and sought assistance from him. McMurtry, who did not drink, much less do drugs, behaved like a gentleman and gave shelter to her and the others. Streitfeld says that Wolfe’s breezy, “hypercharged” account of that event is almost nothing like McMurtry’s painfully detailed memory of it, which he wrote up 40 years later for The New York Review of Books.

Western Star is littered with many innocuous he said/she said accounts, collected from an array of McMurtry friends and relatives.

Sources range from his siblings and extended family to Faye Kesey, Ken’s widow whom McMurtry married late in life; Cybill Shepherd and Peter Bogdanovich, who became his friends from The Last Picture Show; and Diana Ossana, his longtime writing partner who shared an Oscar with him for their adapted screenplay of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain.

Streitfeld’s writing is notable for its descriptive energy and reportorial straightforwardness. Except for the opening, a flash-forward to the Memorial Day 2023 estate auction in San Antonio, Streitfeld tells the writer’s life story in more or less chronological order. He starts with McMurtry’s family history, continues to his birth in 1936 and then marches through his Archer City childhood, his obsessions (books, always books), school days, college years, jobs, writings, loves and friendships (women, always women) and his long list of published books.

Major sections explore successes such as McMurtry’s Stanford writing fellowship, the publication of The Last Picture Show and the release of its film, his blockbuster saga Lonesome Dove and the production of its four-part TV series, and later his Brokeback Mountain screenplay with Ossana.

McMurtry’s biographer was a personal friend who, during the last two decades of his life, became one of the few men McMurtry liked and trusted. Because the journalist was an avid reader and a regular customer who enjoyed browsing and buying at Booked Up, the gigantic Archer City bookstore that now houses the Larry McMurtry Literary Center, Streitfeld gradually overcame McMurtry’s ambivalences. He writes, “I was a crony and confidant despite being male (he didn’t trust men), a newspaper reporter (he found them ridiculous), and a potential biographer (like reporters, but malevolent).”

Streitfeld never gained explicit permission from McMurtry to tell his life story. But then, the author never really wanted to entrust his time and energy to recounting that story formally, for himself or anyone else, especially as age and illness overtook him in the last decade of his life.

McMurtry did give Streitfeld what the publisher of Western Star calls “the keys to his past,” however.

After reading this propulsive book, it is hard to imagine anyone could have done a more thorough, honestly reported yet compassionate job of revealing so much of this elusive figure’s interior life, including his well-hidden tender side and his private generosity.

Larry McMurtry was not an easy man to get to know, but David Streitfeld did it. Now, he has allowed the rest of us who loved McMurtry’s writing to get to know him, too.

Western Star

The Life and Legends

of Larry McMurtry

By David Streitfeld

Publishes Tuesday

(Mariner, 464 pages, $35)

DETAILS

David Streitfeld will be at Interabang Books on

Tuesday at 6 p.m. to discuss the book and sign copies. Interabang is at 5600 W. Lovers Lane, No. 142, Dallas.