Willa cather and larry mcmurtry shared subjects and sensibilities

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Culture | Plains writing WILLA CATHER AND LARRY MCMURTRY SHARED SUBJECTS AND SENSIBILITIES BOTH CHRONICLED THE AMERICAN WEST, EVEN AS THEY SOUGHT TO ESCAPE IT The American West is a great


setting for a story but a hard place to live. That is the theme of new biographies of Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry, 20th-century novelists who abandoned a life among cattle and dust for


the comforts of the city. Yet the writers also shared an inability to escape their roots and returned—in fiction, at least—to the places they had left. McMurtry wrote elegiac (and


occasionally bitter) stories about Texas cowboys. Cather sketched the plains of Nebraska.