Larry McMurtry has 24 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 18 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 467 ratings. The most-rated is Lonesome Dove.
Oh What a Slaughter
Summary
In Oh What a Slaughter, Larry McMurtry has written a unique, brilliant, and searing history of the bloody massacres that marked, and marred, the settling of the American West in the 19th century, and which still provoke immense controversy today. Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres: Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans, and, in the case of the hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children. McMurtry's evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small, Custer's famous defeat at Little Big Horn in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than 200 dead, yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horrors they had committed. From letters and diaries, McMurtry has created a moving and swiftly paced narrative, as memorable in its way as such classics as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
©2005 Larry McMurtry (P)2005 Tantor Media, Inc.
The Colonel & Little Missie
Summary
From the early 1800s to the end of his life in 1917, Buffalo Bill Cody was as famous as anyone could be. Annie Oakley was his most celebrated protegee, the "slip of a girl" from Ohio who could (and did) outshoot anybody to become the most celebrated star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. In this sweeping dual biography, Larry McMurtry explores the lives, the legends, and above all the truth about two larger-than-life American figures. With his Wild West show, Buffalo Bill helped invent the image of the West that still exists today: cowboys and Indians, rodeo, rough rides, sheriffs and outlaws, trick shooting, Stetsons, and buck-skin. The short, slight Annie Oakley, born Phoebe Ann Moses, spent sixteen years with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, where she entertained Queen Victoria, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, among others. Beloved by all who knew her, including Hunkpapa leader, Sitting Bull, Oakley became a legend in her own right and after her death, achieved a new lease of fame in Irving Berlin's musical "Annie, Get Your Gun". To each other, they were always "Missie" and "Colonel". To the rest of the world, they were cultural icons, setting the path for all that followed. Larry McMurtry, a writer who understands the West better than any other, recreates their astonishing careers and curious friendship in a fascinating history that reads like the very best of his fiction.
©2005 Larry McMurtry (P)2005 Tantor Media, Inc.
Hollywood: A Third Memoir
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry follows up Books and Literary Life with this final installment in his memoir trilogy. Tinged with his wry humor and Texas swagger, Hollywood is McMurtry’s anecdote-filled take on Tinseltown from the year his Horseman, Pass By was adapted into Hud (1963) to the year he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain (2005).
©2010 Larry McMurtry (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Roads
Summary
"I wanted to drive the American roads at the century's end to look at the country again, from border to border and beach to beach... "From earliest boyhood the American road has been a part of my life - central to it, I would even say. The ranch house in which I spent my first seven years sits only a mile from highway 281, the long road that traverses the central plains, all the way from Manitoba to the Mexican border..." - Larry McMurtry Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry sets out in Roads on an automotive odyssey exploring America's highways and the culture that has grown up on either side of them. "My method, to the extent that I have one, is modeled on rereading; I want to reread some of the roads as I might a book," he writes. Crisscrossing America in search of the present, the past and himself, McMurtry's route is also his destination.
©2000 by Larry McMurtry (P)2001 Random House, Inc.