Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry - 1999

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. SIGNED. 1st/1st. NF/NF. Great looking copy. First Edition. First printing with number line ending with 1. Signed by Larry McMurtry on the title page. The unread book is tight and square with solid hinges and binding, good tips, and clean unmarred boards. Light creases to spine ends. The textblock is clean with no writing, bookplate, or markings and not BCE, ex-library, or remaindered. Photographic endpapers. The dust jacket is unclipped ($21.00) with faint rubbing, else bright and fine. Protected in a new Brodart Mylar cover. 204 pages. 5½ x 8½" tall.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove presents a revealing memoir of his personal odyssey from rancher's son to critically acclaimed novelist, in an intriguing reminiscence set against the vast and colorful backdrop of the Lone Star State, past and present.

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.