Larry McMurtry has done more than any other living writer to shape our
literary imagination of the American West. With The Last Kind Words
Saloon he returns again to the vivid and unsparing portrait of the
nineteenth-century and cowboy lifestyle made so memorable in his classic
Lonesome Dove. Evoking the greatest characters and legends of the Old
Wild West, here McMurtry tells the story of the closing of the American
frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures: Wyatt
Earp and Doc Holliday.
Opening in the settlement of Long Grass, Texas--not quite in Kansas, and
nearly New Mexico--we encounter the taciturn Wyatt, whiling away his
time in between bottles, and the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc, more
adept at poker than extracting teeth. Now hailed as heroes for their
days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge--more often with a mean
look than a pistol--Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way
of life that is passing into history, two men never more aware of the
growing distance between their lives and their legends.
Along with Wyatt's wife, Jessie, who runs the titular saloon, we meet
Lord Ernle, an English baron; the exotic courtesan San Saba, the most
beautiful whore on the plains; Charlie Goodnight, the Texas Ranger
turned cattle driver last seen in McMurtry's Comanche Moon, and Nellie
Courtright, the witty and irrepressible heroine of Telegraph Days.
McMurtry traces the rich and varied friendship of Wyatt Earp and Doc
Holiday from the town of Long Grass to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in
Denver, then to Mobetie, Texas, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona,
culminating with the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral, rendered here in
McMurtry's stark and peerless prose.
With the buffalo herds gone, the Comanche defeated, and vast swaths of
the Great Plains being enclosed by cattle ranches, Wyatt and Doc live
on, even as the storied West that forged their myths disappears. As
harsh and beautiful, and as brutal and captivating as the open range it
depicts, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of
our most original American writers.
