King, Larry L. 1929-

views updated

King, Larry L. 1929-

PERSONAL:

Born January 1, 1929, in Putnam, TX; son of Clyde Clayton (a farmer and blacksmith) and Cora Lee King; married, wife's name Glenda; married Rosemarie Coumarias (a photographer), February 20, 1965 (deceased, 1972); married Barbara S. Blaine (an attorney), May 6, 1979; children: (first marriage) Cheryl Ann, Kerri Lee, Bradley Clayton; (third marriage) Lindsay, Blaine. Education: Attended Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University), 1949-50. Politics: "Liberal-Internationalist-Democrat." Hobbies and other interests: Breeding show dogs, singing opera, ballet dancing.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Barbara S. Blaine, Ste. 1000, 1015 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20005.

CAREER:

El Paso Natural Gas Co., Jal, NM and Midland, TX, oil field worker, 1943-45; Daily Flare, Hobbs, NM, reporter, 1949; Midland Reporter-Telegram, Midland, TX, reporter, 1950-51, and Odessa, TX, 1952-54; radio station KCRS, Midland, news director, 1951-52; administrative assistant to U.S. Congressman J.T. Rutherford, Washington, DC, 1955-62, and James C. Wright, Jr., 1962-64; Capitol Hill (magazine), Washington, 1965; freelance writer, 1964—; Texhouse Corp., president, 1979—. Member of Kennedy-Johnson campaign team, traveling in Southwest, 1960. Princeton University, Ferris Professor of Journalism and Political Science, Princeton, NJ, 1973-75; Southwest Texas State University, Distinguished Lyndon B. Johnson lecturer, 1991. Military service: U.S. Army Signal Corps, writer, 1946-48; became staff sergeant.

MEMBER:

PEN International, National Writers Union, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Authors Guild, Authors League of America, Dramatists Guild, Screenwriters Guild East, Actors' Equity, Mystic Knights of the Sea.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Neiman fellow, Harvard University, 1969-70; National Book Award nomination, 1971, for Confessions of a White Racist; Stanley Walker Journalism Award, Texas Institute of Letters, 1973, for "The Lost Frontier"; Duke University fellow, 1976; Tony Award nomination for best book of a musical, 1979, for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas; Emmy award, 1981, for CBS Reports (documentary on statehouse politics); elected to Texas Institute of Letters, 1970, and Texas Walk of Stars, 1988; Mary Goldwater Award, Theatre Lobby, 1988; Helen Hayes Award, 1989; Texas Institute of Letters award for best nonfiction article of the year, 2002; Bookends award, Texas Book Festival, 2004; Second Stage at Austin Playhouse Theatre named in his honor, 2006.

WRITINGS:

The One-eyed Man (novel), New American Library (New York, NY), 1966, with an introduction by King and foreword by Fred Erisman, Texas Christian University Press (Forth Worth, TX), 2001.

… And Other Dirty Stories (collected articles), World, 1968.

Confessions of a White Racist (memoir), Viking (New York, NY), 1971.

The Old Man and Lesser Mortals (collected articles), Viking (New York, NY), 1974.

(With Peter Masterson and Carol Hall) The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (musical stage play), produced in New York, NY, 1977.

(With Bobby Baker) Wheeling and Dealing, Norton (New York, NY), 1978.

(With Ben Z. Grant) The Kingfish: A One-Man Play Loosely Depicting the Life and Times of the Late Huey P. Long of Louisiana (play; produced in Washington, DC, 1979), Southern Methodist University Press (Dallas, TX), 1992.

Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians and Other Artists (collected articles), Viking (New York, NY), 1980.

That Terrible Night Santa Got Lost in the Woods, illustrated by Pat Oliphant, Encino Press, 1981.

The Whorehouse Papers (memoir), Viking (New York, NY), 1982.

The Night Hank Williams Died: A Play in Two Acts with Incidental Music (play; produced in Memphis, TN, 1985, new version produced in Washington, DC, 1988), Southern Methodist University Press (Dallas, TX), 1989.

None but a Blockhead: On Being a Writer (memoir), Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

Warning: Writer at Work (nonfiction), Texas Christian University Press (Forth Worth, TX), 1986.

The History of Calhan and Vicinity, 1888-1988, Gaddy, 1987.

The Golden Shadows Old West Museum (play; produced in Little Rock, AR, 1988), Texas Christian University Press (Forth Worth, TX), 1993.

Because of Lozo Brown (children's book), illustrated by Amy Schwartz, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

The Blue Chip Prospect, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1989.

(With Peter Masterson and Carol Hall) The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public (musical stage play; sequel to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, produced in New York, NY, 1994), Samuel French (New York, NY), 1999.

True Facts, Tall Tales, and Pure Fiction, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1997.

Larry L. King: A Writer's Life in Letters; or, Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, edited by Richard A. Holland, Texas Christian University Press (Fort Worth, TX), 1999.

In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor (biography), Public Affairs (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to Texas Observer, 1964-74, Harper's, 1967-71, New Times, 1974-77, Texas Monthly, 1973-78, and Parade magazine, beginning 1983.

ADAPTATIONS:

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was adapted for film, screenplay by King and others, Universal Pictures, 1982; That Terrible Night Santa Got Lost in the Woods was adapted for the stage as Christmas: 1933 (produced in Memphis, TN, 1986), Samuel French (New York, NY), 1987.

SIDELIGHTS:

Larry L. King has applied his writing skills to diverse projects, from a serious look at racial prejudice in Confessions of a White Racist to his bawdy musical comedy The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. King is a Texan who has lived in other parts of the country, but his background influences all of his writing. As New York Times Book Review contributor Richard Lingeman commented, King's work "is mostly about Texas, even when it is about such lesser places as Washington and New York City."

King had worked in the nation's capital as an administrative assistant for several years when, in 1964, he impulsively left his position to return to Texas and write a novel. The One-eyed Man examines the struggle for integration in a southern university, a timely subject in the early 1960s. Critics dealt harshly with King's first novel, however. He turned his attention to magazine writing and soon found success in that field. In the New Republic, Foster Hirsch characterized King's magazine work as that of a man who "is flagrantly a new journalist" with a highly personal style. Several collections of his articles have been published, including … And Other Dirty Stories, The Old Man and Lesser Mortals, and Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians and Other Artists; all have been very favorably reviewed.

Despite the reaction to The One-eyed Man, reviewer Jonathan Yardley found that King has many of the finer qualities of a novelist. Discussing The Old Man and Lesser Mortals in the Washington Post Book World, Yardley noted that most collections of a journalist's work only serve to point out the ephemeral nature of much magazine writing. He believed, however, that "the pieces that Larry King has brought together in The Old Man and Lesser Mortals do not merely weather the transition, they thrive on it. That is because King's work is notable for the persistence and consistency with which it explores certain themes. King is a novelist masquerading in journalist's clothing … and he has the novelist's sense of thematic unity…. He returns over and again to the same preoccupations. Chief among them, perhaps, are a reverence for the American past and a fierce dislike for the shabby commercialism with which it is being replaced…. King succeeds, however, in revering the past without sentimentalizing it."

Hirsch also found The Old Man and Lesser Mortals to be a remarkably unified collection. He suggested that the articles are bound together by King's "continuing wrestling match with his heritage. Small-town folksiness underlies the slick magazine writer's polish." Whether writing about a trip to the Alamo, a visit to a small-town diner, or a football game, "King ‘works’ his material for larger purposes than local color portraiture. His trips home afford glimpses of the national state of mind…. Skillfully King builds his miniature subjects into capacious essays on the American character…. With these circumscribed, personally accented pieces drawn from the American heartland, King is unfailingly vivid."

Confessions of a White Racist is as intensely personal as any of King's magazine pieces, and it is widely regarded as his most serious work. It begins with the author's youth in West Texas, where intolerance toward blacks was the unquestioned norm. King relates how he assimilated those local attitudes, then grew beyond them and left his homeland. He found, however, that prejudice was as deeply rooted, if better concealed, in Washington and Cambridge as it was in Texas. Eventually he began to question the authenticity of his own tolerance.

Geoffrey Wolff praised King's emotional honesty in his Newsweek review of Confessions of a White Racist, stating: "Its twisting, backtracking course through the author's racial prejudice bespeaks an authentic complication of values."

King's best-known project is far removed from the pessimistic tone of Confessions of a White Racist. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a rowdy musical comedy based loosely on an article King sold to Playboy magazine in 1974 concerning the closing of a famous country brothel in Texas. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas became one of Broadway's longest-running plays, and a film version was also produced, starring Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds. The play took King from the uncertain life of a freelance journalist to the 1979 Tony Awards ceremony.

But success was not without problems, as King "hilariously and venomously chronicles … with country-boy cunning" in what Time reviewer J.D. Reed considered his "best book," The Whorehouse Papers. Disagreements with collaborators, personality clashes, and a feeling of powerlessness as his original work was changed by others all contributed to King's worsening alcoholism as work on the musical progressed. Therefore, found Reed, "beyond the ribaldry and self-promotion lies a melancholy, intriguing tale of a writer in trouble." King emerges from his first Broadway venture "brutalized, agonized and hospitalized, although ‘about two-thirds rich.’" Robert M. Klaus also found much to admire in The Whorehouse Papers, which he called in the New York Times Book Review "a sharply written, funny, even moving book…. This is a book about making it, about how—for money, fame, or the sheer joy of it—people get things done. Such books are usually enlightening, often inspirational. This one is both. They could make a musical out of it."

In reviewing None but a Blockhead: On Being a Writer for People, Campbell Geeslin commented on King's Texas roots and wrote that Americans benefited from King, "rude, crude, smart and often hilarious—to explain people like their President, Lyndon Johnson, who was rude, crude, smart and often hilarious." In this autobiography, King tells aspiring writers how someone with no formal training went on to achieve success.

The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public is a sequel to the hit and is about the whorehouse being threatened with closure for back taxes.

The subtitle of King's Larry L. King: A Writer's Life in Letters; or, Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye is a reference to the effects of his alcohol consumption and drug use. King has always been a prolific writer of letters, which provide a great deal of insight into his life. He corresponded as a child, and letters that came to his family's farmhouse by rural mail carrier had a great impact on King. Tom Doyal commented in a review for the Austin Chronicle Online that editor Dick Holland aided King in selecting the letters included in this volume, adding: "Holland's contribution to the book is noteworthy for his ability to place the gemstone in a setting that makes every facet blaze and pulse with life." Doyal noted that King wrote to friends and family, publishers, agents, both amateur and professional critics, and to other writers, including Willie Morris, William Styron, and others. "Among the most revealing letters are those to his cousin and childhood friend Lanville Gilbert and his spouse Glenda." The letters span the years from 1954 to 1999, and include the period he spent as a congressional assistant, during which time President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor is King's tribute to his friend of forty years, the man who, at age thirty-two, was anointed editor of Harper's magazine. Morris, the Mississippi-born former editor of the Texas Observer, engaged many new writers, including King, to write for Harper's, but his time as editor was short-lived and tumultuous (1967-1971). Morris's management style was uneven, as was his personality. In addition to King, he was also responsible for kick-starting the careers of David Halberstam, Marshall Frady, and John Corry. Morris turned entire issues over to Norman Mailer, whose career was rejuvenated by his reportage of Vietnam protests, the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions, and the feminist movement. Morris's own biography, New York Days (1993), also describes his publishing success and rise in the elite circles of New York's literati and power brokers. Morris left Harper's because of differences with the owners, the Cowles family of Minnesota. He moved back to Mississippi, where he continued to write, including My Dog Skip, which was made into a movie. King's sometime drinking buddy died in 1999 at the age of sixty-four, and left a memoir, North toward Home.

In reviewing the book in Library Journal, Charles C. Nash noted that nearly half of the book describes "Morris's pathetic fall from self-assurance and influence into alcoholism and creative impotence." Morris was a great editor, however, and one who valued quality over word count, allowing as little or as much space to his writers as it took for them to tell the story. In reviewing the book for the Writer, Steve Weinberg noted that King describes Morris as being "the editor who was not only near-perfect in matching writer to subject but so adroit a copy editor—pruning excesses, changing a serviceable word to one of more clarity or originality—that writers felt chagrin they hadn't written it that way." A Publishers Weekly contributor declared: "This insider's memoir will be savored by Morris's friends and fans."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

King, Larry L., A Writer's Life in Letters; or, Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, edited by Richard A. Holland, Texas Christian University Press (Fort Worth, TX), 1999.

King, Larry L., Confessions of a White Racist, Viking (New York, NY), 1971.

King, Larry L., None but a Blockhead: On Being a Writer, Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

King, Larry L., The Whorehouse Papers, Viking (New York, NY), 1982.

PERIODICALS

Backstage, May 6, 1994, Jerry Tallmer, review of The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, p. 7; May 20, 1994, David A. Rosenberg, review of The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, p. 44.

Biography, spring, 2006, Will Blythe, review of In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor, p. 403.

Booklist, February 15, 2006, Brad Hooper, review of In Search of Willie Morris, p. 31.

Book World, April 2, 2006, "Jonathan Yardley: How an Ambitious Son of Mississippi Rose and Fell in Manhattan before Returning Home to Southern Comfort," p. 2.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, October, 2006, S.W. Whyte, review of In Search of Willie Morris, p. 299.

Christian Science Monitor, May 17, 1994, Frank Scheck, review of The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, p. 12.

Columbia Journalism Review, March-April, 2006, short excerpt from In Search of Willie Morris, p. 62.

Dallas Magazine, June, 1980, Roslyn R. Dawson, review of Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians and Other Artists, p. 64.

Journal of the West, April, 1987, Allan O. Kownslar, review of Warning: Writer at Work, p. 109.

Library Journal, August, 1980, Tony Ficociello, review of Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians and Other Artists, p. 1652; February 1, 1986, Vicky Hay, review of None but a Blockhead, p. 83; March 1, 2006, Charles C. Nash, review of In Search of Willie Morris, p. 86.

Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1982, Dan Sullivan, review of The Whorehouse Papers, p. 56.

New Republic, March 16, 1974, Foster Hirsch, review of The Old Man and Lesser Mortals, p. 29.

Newsweek, June 7, 1971, Geoffrey Wolff, review of Confessions of a White Racist, p. 110.

New York, May 5, 1980, Robert Sherrill, review of Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians and Other Artists, p. 64.

New York Times Book Review, April 20, 1980, Richard Lingeman, review of Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians and Other Artists, p. 12; March 29, 1981, review of Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians and Other Artists, p. 43; April 25, 1982, Robert M. Klaus, review of The Whorehouse Papers, p. 14; February 6, 1986, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of None but a Blockhead, p. 21; February 23, 1986, Richard Rosen, review of None but a Blockhead, p. 20.

Nieman Reports, Spring 1990, Mary Jordan, review of The Night Hank Williams Died: A Play in Two Acts with Incidental Music.

People, April 7, 1986, Campbell Geeslin, review of None but a Blockhead, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, February 8, 1980, review of Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians and Other Artists, p. 76; December 20, 1985, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of None but a Blockhead, p. 56; October 11, 1999, review of Larry L. King: A Writer's Life in Letters; or, Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, p. 66; January 16, 2006, review of In Search of Willie Morris, p. 53.

Southern Living, May, 2006, Kathleen Johnston, review of In Search of Willie Morris, p. 62.

Texas Monthly, May, 1986, Jan Reid, review of None but a Blockhead, p. 174.

Time, May 24, 1982, J.D. Reed, review of The Whorehouse Papers, p. 80.

Variety, February 26, 2001, "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," p. 53.

Washington Post Book World, February 17, 1974, Jonathan Yardley, review of The Old Man and Lesser Mortals, p. 3.

Wilson Quarterly, summer, 2006, Nick Gillespie, review of In Search of Willie Morris, p. 100.

Writer, August, 2006, Steve Weinberg, review of In Search of Willie Morris, p. 50.