Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen
Subtitle: reflections at sixty and beyond
By: Larry McMurtry.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 204
Subjects: McMurtry, Larry; McMurtry, Larry -- Books and reading; McMurtry, Larry -- Homes and haunts -- Texas; Novelists, American -- 20th century -- Biography; Antiquarian booksellers -- United States -- Biography; Books and reading -- Texas; Texas -- Intellectual life -- 20th century; Texas -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Description: "In a work of nonfiction - as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get - 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."--BOOK JACKET.

"Using as a springboard 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 and the lost art of oral storytelling to the perfect piece of pie, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, the significance of small-town rodeos (and rodeo queens), the reality and the myth of the frontier."--BOOK JACKET.

"McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, 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."--BOOK JACKET.