George Getschow is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for distinguished writing about the underprivileged. He has earned numerous other awards for his writing and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2012 for "distinctive literary achievement." Today, as director of the Archer City Writers Workshop, he helps organize and conduct annual writing workshops in Archer City for professional writers and college and high school students from across the country.

• George Getschow, Acknowledgments
• Stephen Graham Jones, Foreword
• George Getschow, Introduction
• Native Ground
  • Charlie McMurtry, In Awesome Wonder
  • Paulette Jiles, The Boy with the Lamp
  • Skip Hollandsworth, The Larry McMurtry I Knew
  • Erik Calonius, The Master Geologist of Archer County
  • Joe W. Specht, Larry’s Oil-Patch Legacy
• Teacher and Apprentices
  • William Broyles, Leave His Saddle on the Wall
  • Gregory Curtis, McMurtry’s Mild Discouragement
  • Mike Evans, “Mike, It’s Larry. I’m in Trouble.”
• Myth Buster and Myth Maker
  • Geoff Dyer, Ranging across Texas
  • Doug J. Swanson, Gus, Call, Danny, and the Rangers
  • Oscar Cásares, Snakes in a River
  • Sarah Bird, Finding Home
• Reader and Bookman
  • Bill Marvel, Larry McMurtry, Reader
  • Greg Giddings, An Afternoon with Larry
  • Brandon Kennedy, On Book Scouting and Ghostwritten Erotica
  • Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Runaways
  • Kathryn Jones, Bonding over Books
• Collaborators and Confidants
  • Diana Ossana, Stirring the Memories
  • Michael Korda, The Moby-Dick of the Plains
  • Carol Flake Chapman, My Long Trail to Lonesome Dove
  • Susan Freudenheim, An Unlikely Bond
  • Sherry Kafka Wagner, Not So Silent Women
  • Beverly Lowry, Scenes from a Friendship
  • Katy Vine, Road Trip Tips from Larry McMurtry
• Critic and Champion
  • John Nova Lomax, To Hell with the Sunny Slopes
  • Jim Black, Writer, Pass By
  • Elizabeth Crook, Loving Gus
• Workshopper
  • Kathy Floyd, Somewhere, a Writer . . .
  • Eric Nishimoto, McMurtry’s Rebuff
  • Dianne Solis, At the Intersection of Aspiration and Asphyxiation
  • Cathy Booth Thomas, Reckoning at Idiot Ridge
  • Dave Tarrant, “Furthur”
• Legacy
  • Stephen Harrigan, Writing Plainly and Unforgettably
  • Alfredo Corchado, The Borderlands: A Home for Misfits Like Me and McMurtry’s Danny Deck
  • W. K. Stratton, All My Friends Are Going to Be Larry
  • Lawrence Wright, McMurtry Passes By