Author Talk: David Streitfeld — Western Star- with Marie Arana

Author David Streitfeld discusses their book "Western Star" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West.

Western Star reveals the real and complicated life of a storyteller who was both an icon and critic of Texas, the favorite of presidents, confidant to movie stars like Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd, friend to Ken Kesey and husband to his widow Faye, an obsessive bookseller, and the most enduring voice of the American West.

David Streitfeld is a prize-winning journalist who is publishing Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry in early 2026. The book is the harvest of extensive research into the iconic Texas writer, whom David knew well. Like his subject, David spent many years in Washington, attending college there and then going to work for The Washington Post, where he became the paper's literary correspondent. In 1999, he drifted West, working for The Los Angeles Times and later The New York Times. He was part of a team that won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. Much of his work at the Times has been about Amazon and the rise of digital book culture. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family and too many books.

Streitfeld is in conversation with Marie Arana, who is a prizewinning author of eight books, nonfiction and fiction. Winner of an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature in 2020, she has been a former executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a guest columnist on Latin America for the New York Times, a television commentator on books and publishing, and editor in chief of Book World at the Washington Post. She is also the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Marie is most recently the author of “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority,” chosen by the New Yorker as one of the 12 Must Read Books of the Year.

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