Center & Main

It may come as a surprise to Larry McMurtry’s world-wide fan club that the author of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, Horsemen, Pass By and many other bestselling novels considers Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen one of his two best books. Written with a pen inside Archer City’s Dairy Queen as a sort of paean to the German literary critic, Walter Benjamin, McMurtry examines his homeplace, his ranching heritage, a life spent herding books and the lost art of oral storytelling. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen is, if anything, McMurtry’s meditation on his homeplace and his memories of that place.

“Center & Main: Stories from the Heart of McMurtry Country” is our literary version of Archer City’s Dairy Queen. The Archer City Writers Workshop wanted to create an attractive gathering spot to carry on a deep conversation with folks in Archer County and around the world about the importance of storytelling in McMurtry’s homeplace, the place that gave rise to his life’s work and the work of a new generation of writers who have followed in his footsteps. We believe that Center & Main, like Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen has, as McMurtry put it, ”the potential for storytelling of the sort Walter Benjamin favored.”