Word: kindly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gullible public. In 1973 McGuane upped the ante with Ninety-Two in the Shade, a dazzling novel of free- floating angst and male brinkmanship set in the Florida Keys. Ninety-Two was nominated for a National Book Award, and McGuane became, in the words of ^ Saul Bellow, "a kind of language star." Critics compared the 34-year-old author to Faulkner, Hemingway, Chekov and Camus. The big time -- and Tinseltown -- beckoned. McGuane became a celluloid hotshot, penning scripts for Rancho Deluxe and Tom Horn among other movies. In exchange for writing 1976's The Missouri Breaks, which starred Marlon Brando...
...romance with McGuane in her autobiography, which described him as a "psychedelic cowboy" and "aging juvenile delinquent." Meanwhile, the deaths of both his parents and his sister took a heavy toll. "I come from a family that has a lot of alcoholism," McGuane confides. "I became really kind of an unpleasant drinker...
...Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation from well-mannered writer to party animal and back again has led some to wonder which is the real McGuane. Both and neither, answers McGuane, who is irked by the fact that his wild and crazy days have taken on "a kind of monster reality" in the press. "During that period I was supposed to be living in the street, I also wrote ten movies, a novel and about 25 pieces of journalism," he says with annoyance. "Even in the flamboyant period of the '70s, I would say 85% of my waking time was spent...
...wing chair, McGuane exudes the tempered confidence of hard-won experience. While many of his erstwhile drinking partners have fallen by the wayside, he has managed not only to survive but to thrive in his role of gentleman rancher and Marlboro Man of letters. "I guess I'm kind of like lip cancer," he says with a wry smile. "I just won't go away...
McGuane is alert to revealing parallels between the art of cutting cattle and the craft of writing novels. "You cannot work cattle by force," he explains. "A cutting horse separates a cow from the herd through a kind of choreographic countermovement. It's very much like fiction: you can't sit down and say, 'Goddammit, I'm going to blast out these sentences and send them to the publisher' -- this kind of John Wayneism of literature. You just can't." He finds the notion of a so-called Rocky Mountain school of literature equally specious. Still, he admits that "there...