AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Larry McMurtry was the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Lonesome Dove.” He won an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain,” and he founded a bookstore in his hometown, Archer City, Texas. The store was eventually acquired by HGTV’s Chip and Joanna Gaines, then sold and recently transformed into a literary center. The hope is that it can jump-start a tourism economy in Archer City centered on its favorite son. John Burnett has the story.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: The lunch crowd at Murn’s Cafe in Archer City.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: You’re very welcome, sweetie. Have a good day.
BURNETT: An evangelist is preaching on the TV in the corner. Chicken-fried steak is the daily special on the menu. Proprietor Murn Wages remembers her famous customer, Larry McMurtry, in the years before he died in 2021.
MURN WAGES: I miss him being here. He sat right there at that booth, and he ordered a cheeseburger cut in half and a piece of cherry pie.
BURNETT: McMurtry was a celebrated novelist, screenwriter and essayist of the Old West and contemporary Texas. Films adapted from his books – like “Horseman, Pass By,” “The Last Picture Show” and “Terms Of Endearment” – won 13 Oscars. The TV series “Lonesome Dove” won seven Emmys. McMurtry was also a voracious book collector. His sprawling collection in this tiny town two hours northwest of Dallas became an international attraction. To Murn’s delight, the bookstore reopened last spring, but only on weekends.
WAGES: I hope it starts bringing a lot of tourists back to our little town. It was neat ’cause people came from overseas. People came from all over the world to go to Larry’s bookstore.
BURNETT: Two blocks down Center Street from Murn’s Cafe sits the Larry McMurtry Literary Center, next to the Methodist Church and across the street from the Baptists. It is housed inside of his famous bookstore, Booked Up.
GEORGE GETSCHOW: We’re here inside Booked Up. This was a place that Larry – it was the center of his literary universe.
BURNETT: George Getschow, award-winning former journalist, educator and now executive director of the Literary Center, stands reverently next to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
GETSCHOW: He got married inside here. He directed in his will that his ashes be kept here forever and ever. He wrote in the morning, spent all of his time the rest of the day pricing books, curating books, writing comments in books and cherishing these books. I’ve never known anyone who loved books as much as Larry McMurtry.
BURNETT: Time was McMurtry had four locations in town, crammed with more than 400,000 books. After he died, along came Chip and Joanna Gaines of the fixer-upper Magnolia Network. They bought his remaining collection so they could cherry-pick books to stock the library in their new, upscale hotel in Waco. Meanwhile, Getschow had been looking for a permanent home for his Archer City writers workshop. Last year, the Gaineses sold Booked Up to the Getschow group, and it became the Larry McMurtry Literary Center.
GETSCHOW: The goal of the literary center is to preserve and perpetuate this book collection, this remarkable, immense book collection. This is a – really is a temple. It’s a sacred place. We all feel that way.
BURNETT: It’s also falling apart, like the ramshackle houses of the cowboys who populate McMurtry’s books. Kathy Floyd, managing director of the center, says they need heating and air conditioning, new plumbing and a new roof.
KATHY FLOYD: Water comes in at the ground level, and it seeps in and leaves puddles. The books that are on the bottom shelves have been damaged because it soaks up.
GETSCHOW: And we lost a number of books that were against that wall, really very precious books that we put there ’cause we had no other place to put them.
BURNETT: In much of his writing, McMurtry was rough on Archer City. Just watch “The Last Picture Show.” He portrayed the suffocating bleakness of small-town life and self-destructive cowboys and oil field hands who burned out early. But then McMurtry came home. His ambitions were to turn his one-stoplight hometown into one of the world’s great book centers. Jenny Schroeder is volunteer coordinator at the writers center and an Archer City native. She says McMurtry himself cowboyed on the family ranch when he was growing up.
JENNY SCHROEDER: For Archer City itself, it means a lot that he was part of our town. He came from this ranching tradition that is still alive, very much alive today. And I think it shows the value in that tradition, and it also shows the value in an alternate route.
BURNETT: McMurtry took that alternate route. Books revealed a kaleidoscopic world beyond the ranch and celebrated the life of the mind. He would write them and collect them and treasure them his entire life. Today, the Larry McMurtry Literary Center aspires to keep his passion for books alive and promote a different kind of travel – literary tourism.
For NPR News, I’m John Burnett in Archer City, Texas. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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