Tracy Daugherty

"A biography of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry from New York Times bestselling author Tracy Daugherty. In over forty books, in a career that spanned over sixty years, Larry McMurtry staked his claim as a superior chronicler of the American West, and as the Great Plains' keenest witness since Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. Larry McMurtry: A Life traces his origins as one of the last American writers...

Acclaimed by critics as a second F. Scott Fitzgerald, Billy Lee Brammer was once one of the most engaging young novelists in America. "Brammer's is a new and major talent, big in scope, big in its promise of even better things to come," wrote A. C. Spectorsky, a former staffer at the New Yorker. When he published his first and only novel, “The Gay Place”, in 1961, literary luminaries such as David Halberstam, Willie Morris, and Gore Vidal hailed...

"High Skies recounts the collision of devastating weather, Cold War suspicion, tense race relations, and the unintended consequences of good intentions in a small West Texas town in the 1950s, changing the futures of the families there and altering their perceptions of America. At the center of this perfect storm is Raymond "Flyboy" Seaker, a respected military veteran, now the vice principal of a school in which Troy, who tells the story, and his...

Desire Provoked is an amusing look at modern living, while also a meditation on fatherhood, marriage and ambition. The cartographer protagonist of the novel, Sam Adams, can't seem to map out his own life while he maps everything else for a living.

In this, his third collection, Tracy Daugherty focuses on social and cultural forces shaping people's intimate behavior. Set in Texas and Oklahoma, the stories and novella suggest that even politics is a kind of family squabble whose elusive solutions often come from unexpected quarters. In "Power Lines," a young man's sexual awakening in Midland, Texas, coincides with lessons about heroism and loyalty one hot summer that is suddenly seared with violence....

The narrative interweaves history, myth, rumor, and news with the experiences of a young girl living in the flatness of South Florida. Like Grace Paley's narrators, she is pensive and eager, hungry for experience but restrained. Into the sphere of her regard come a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. What these...

The themes woven through The Woman in the Oil Field involve action and passivity and the different perspectives they inspire. Tracy Daugherty's characters walk the margins of life; seeking the safe periphery from which they assess their friends, lovers, and relatives who lead real lives. Daugherty treats perspective and insight as topics in themselves.

George Harrison met Muhammad Ali in 1964, when both men were on the cusp of worldwide fame. We Shook Up the World is the story of these two larger-than-life figures at a momentous time. A unique blend of biography and cultural history, this book goes to the very heart of the zeitgeist that each man inhabited and reinvented in profound and enduring ways. In 1974, deep in the Pennsylvania woods, thirty-two-year-old Muhammad Ali was seeking renewal,...

"A dual biography of George Harrison and Muhammad Ali, two complex icons of the 1960s, culminating in 1974, when both men reemerged in their respective professions. These men displayed that tenacity of the rebellious spirit of a vanishing era that challenged the cultural and political hegemony of the West and American military dominance"--