McMurtry recounts his development as a novelist and man of letters, from his early influences and the writing of his first books through decades of reading, teaching, and the movie adaptations of his fiction.
Books mentioned in Literary Life: A Second Memoir (26)
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway: “From the American tent I admire the workaday but forceful prose of Theodore Dreiser, and of course the brilliance and economy of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.”
Diaries and Letters by Harold Nicolson: “I once enjoyed Harold Nicolson's Journals, but doubt I'll look at them again.”
Daisy Miller by Henry James: “He had always wanted to make "Daisy Miller," the famous Henry James short story, and his three hits gave him the power to make most anything he wanted.”
The Lady, or the Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton: “Stockton's "The Lady, or the Tiger?" Such masters as Hemingway, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, or distant giants such as Chekhov...”
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin: “a copy of Melmoth the Wanderer, in the attractive three-volume Bentley reprint, a book that proved much easier to sell than to read.”
On the Road by Jack Kerouac: “Jack Kerouac I never met, and I regret that, because I think his one really good novel, On the Road, marked the real end of New Critical dominance.”
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner: “These are both excellent novels, though, personally, I have a slight preference for Crossing to Safety.”
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway: “I felt something like Hemingway mentioned feeling in A Moveable Feast, when, in Spain, he wrote two stories in one day.”
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner: “I started at the end of his fiction, Crossing to Safety, and then moved back to Angle of Repose, which won the Pulitzer Prize.”
City of Night by John Rechy: “This would have been, I think, before John's first novel, City of Night, was published.”
From Here to Eternity by James Jones: “the single most vicious letter I have ever read was the letter Hemingway wrote Scribners when they asked him to give a blurb to From Here to Eternity.”
On Photography by Susan Sontag: “If I had to choose two of her books to take with me to the proverbial desert island they would be Where the Stress Falls and At the Same Time, with On Photography a close third.”
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey: “I am one of the minority who think the second book, Sometimes a Great Notion, is a better book than Cuckoo's Nest.”
The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock: “When I began to write novels the most admired work of theory, where prose fiction was concerned, was probably Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction.”
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie: “the Iranian cleric the Ayatollah Khomeini shocked or at least startled the literary world by issuing his famous fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie.”
The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly: “His aphoristic The Unquiet Grave is mandarin but his novel The Rock Pool and most of his reviewing, some of it very fine, is not.”
ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound: “From my beginner's library I retain one book, a copy of Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, which I acquired just before I abandoned the library.”
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell: “Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet was probably the first to really grab me, perhaps because of the huge success of the first book, Justine.”
Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye: “Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, the most important critical book published during my academic years.”
Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster: “Forster's Aspects of the Novel, as well as the highly colored didactic work of Georg Lukács and others.”
Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh: “Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy is a fine example of prose that gets the job done.”
The Great Tradition by F. R. Leavis: “Leavis's The Great Tradition, and his wife, Q.”
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein: “the masterwork of incremental repetition, if there is one, is Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans.”
We Pointed Them North by E. C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott: “It had to be northern Montana because of the book that inspired it, the cowboy-rancher Teddy Blue Abbott's We Pointed Them North.”
The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham: “his valedictory statement is to be found in a lovely book called The Summing Up, which, in my youth, I read many times.”