The biographer of the pre-eminent Texas chronicler recounts an infamous encounter with Ken Kesey’s gang of LSD enthusiasts, later immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

By David Streitfeld

Most novelists lead quiet lives, just them and the typewriter. Larry McMurtry strived for this ideal, but things just kept happening to him.

Movie stars such as Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd would fall in love with the Texan writer. Presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama celebrated him and his work. Someone would randomly pick up one of his books in a bookstore and decide they had to make a movie out of it right now, which is how Paul Newman came to make his classic Hud, an adaptation of McMurtry’s novel Horseman, Pass By, in 1963.

“If I have a genius for anything, it’s for being found,” the writer once told a friend. READ ON