My copy of All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers was a Pocket Books mass-market paperback. This article appears in the Fall 2021 issue of Alta Journal. “Of course most of them had stopped living there years before, but in my mind that was where they lived when they were not in Denver, or on the road, and when I walked the streets I always half expected to come around a corner and see Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg.” “All I knew was that I wanted to be somewhere near North Beach, where the Beat Generation lived,” the narrator of All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, a novelist named Danny Deck, enthuses after moving from Houston to San Francisco. McMurtry felt to me like he was part of that. Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and the Beats. The writers to whom I gravitated included Sam Greenlee, Richard Condon, and Erica Jong. I was already a reader, but there was a difference, I was discovering, between what I’d been instructed to read and what I encountered on my own. This was the mid-1970s, and I was in my early teens.įor me, the books I bought represented promises or invitations, the earliest emerging signposts of what I imagined as the broad terrain of literature, a landscape I was desperate to map.

They were cheap-10¢ apiece or at most a quarter-which meant that for $5 or so, I could pick up a full slate of summer reading. I would go to that sale every year and come home with stacks of titles. I bought his 1972 novel All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers at a book sale, long tables arrayed across the wooden floor of a Manhattan high school gymnasium, slanted rows of dog-eared paperbacks.

It seems impossible in retrospect, but there it is.

I didn’t think, at first, of Larry McMurtry as a Texas writer.

Moving on by larry mcmurtry