Podcast summary

Larry McMurtry-Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-winning, screenwriter, essayist, and bookseller-will receive the 2008 Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award on April 30. As part of the tradition of the Literary Award, the recipient delivers a free public lecture. Join Mr. McMurtry for an afternoon of insights into his work and his life. "No other author has so thoroughly and delightfully debunked the ill-advised romanticism of the American West. An American landmark in the world of fiction." (Jami Edwards, on Bookreporter.com).

Participant(s) Bio

Larry McMurtry received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1985 novel Lonesome Dove and an Academy Award and Golden Globe for his screen adaptation (co-written with Diana Ossana) of the film Brokeback Mountain.

Mr. McMurtry's other novels-many of which have been made into motion pictures-include Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Cadillac Jack, Anything for Billy, and The Berrybender Narratives tetralogy, as well as numerous critical essays including Film Flam, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, and Sacagawea's Nickname. He is also a book collector and the proprietor of Booked Up, in his hometown of Archer City, Tex., which is arguably the largest single used bookstore in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000 titles.

William Deverell is a professor of history at USC, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs a scholarly institute that collaborates with the Huntington Library in Pasadena. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. He is past chair of the California Council for the Humanities and a recent Fellow of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation of Los Angeles. He is also a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.

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