Larry McMurtry has done more than any other living writer to shape our literary imagination of the American West. With The Last Kind Words Saloon he returns again to the vivid and unsparing portrait of the nineteenth-century cowboy lifestyle made so memorable in his classic Lonesome Dove. Evoking the greatest characters and legends of the Old Wild West, McMurtry now tells the story of the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Opening in the settlement of Long Grass, Texas not quite in Kansas, and nearly New Mexico we encounter the taciturn Wyatt, whiling away his time in between bottles, and the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc, more adept at poker than extracting teeth. Hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge more often with a mean look than a pistol Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way of life that is passing into history, two men never more aware of the growing distance between their lives and their legends. Along with Wyatt's wife, Jessie, who runs the titular saloon, we meet Lord Ernle, and English baron; the exotic courtesan San Saba, "the most beautiful whore on the plains"; Charlie Goodnight, the Texas Ranger turned cattle driver last seen in McMurtry's Comanche Moon; and Nellie Courtright, the witty and irrepressible heroine of Telegraph Days. McMurtry traces the rich and varied friendship of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday from the town of Long Grass to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, then to Mobetie, Texas, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, where the story culminates with the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral, rendered here in McMurtry's stark and peerless prose. -- Jacket flaps.