In Literary Life: A Second Memoir (2005), McMutry offered this reminiscence on the Prizes:
"The day I found out that Lonesome Dove had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, I happened to be lecturing at a small college in Uvalde, Texas. I think I may have been the first writer to speak in Uvalde, home of John Nance Garner, Roosevelt's outspoken vice president (for a while) who remarked famously that the vice presidency 'wasn't worth a bootful of warm spit.' (There are variant versions, of course.)
"Because they had never had a speaker before, the college in Uvalde wanted to be sure and get its money's worth, and they did. It was during my half-hour lunch break that I learned about the Pulitzer, a prize about which the writer William H. Gass has some pithy things to say.
"James [McMurtry, his son] was living in San Antonio at the time—Uvalde was not far so he came over to help me celebrate, a doomed effort since I was dead tired from all day lecturing and had to drive to Austin, which was pretty far, to appear on a panel at the LBJ Library in the morning—a confab at which the then mayor of San Antonio, Henry Cisneros, brusquely insulted me.
"As I was preparing to leave Uvalde I noticed the marquee of the Holiday Inn where I had been staying. When I arrived it read 'Welcome to Larry McMurtry, Author of Terms of Endearment.' By the next afternoon, despite a bunch of reporters showing up to interview me, the marquee had already been changed. Now it read: Catfish Special, $3.99.
"Sic Transit Gloria DeHaven, as the fine Texas writer Edwin 'Bud' Shrake once observed."
-- Copyright © 2009 by Larry McMurtry