Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry shared subjects and sensibilities

The is a great setting for a story but a hard place to live. That is the theme of new biographies of Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry, 20th-century novelists who abandoned a life among cattle and dust for the comforts of the city. Yet the writers also shared an inability to escape their roots and returned—in fiction, at least—to the places they had left. McMurtry wrote elegiac (and occasionally bitter) stories about cowboys. Cather sketched the plains of Nebraska.Tracy Daugherty, who has written biographies of Joan Didion and Joseph Heller, has now completed a comprehensive and nuanced account of McMurtry—the first since McMurtry produced memorable books including “The Last Picture Show” (1966), a send-up of his northern Texas hometown, and “Lonesome Dove” (1985), about a cattle drive, which won a Pulitzer prize.