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Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
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Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond Paperback - 2001

by Larry McMurtry

In a brilliant work of nonfiction--as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get--Larry McMurtry paints a clever but revealing self-portrait as he chronicles the story of his family and the larger story of Texas itself.


From the publisher

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.​ McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

First line

IN THE summer of 1980, in the Archer City Dairy Queen, while nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the road-Olney's, eighteen miles south-but easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a Dr Pepper), I opened a book called Illuminations and read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller," nominally a study of or reflection on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel, after several rereadings) an examination, and a profound one, of the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentieth-century lives.

Details

  • Title Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
  • Author Larry McMurtry
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition 1st Touchstone E
  • Pages 208
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Simon & Schuster, New York
  • Date 2001-08-07
  • ISBN 9780684870199 / 0684870193
  • Weight 0.4 lbs (0.18 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 in (20.07 x 13.21 x 1.78 cm)
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 20th Century
    • Geographic Orientation: Texas
  • Library of Congress subjects Texas, Novelists, American - 20th century
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

Media reviews

Citations

  • New York Times, 07/29/2001, Page 20

About the author

Larry McMurtry (1936-2021) was the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lived in Archer City, Texas.
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Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
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Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond

by McMurtry, Larry

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Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond

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Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
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Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond

by McMurtry, Larry

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