No film buff could walk by the promise of a new Larry McMurtry biography, remember “Hud,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Lonesome Dove” and “Brokeback Mountain” and not at least stop to thumb through the book’s photos. But if you love movies, and modern and period piece Westerns, you need to do more than browse.

Tracy Daugherty’s “Larry McMurtry: A Life” is a detailed appreciation of the writer who read and wrote his way out of Archer City, Texas — his struggles, his loves, his stumbles and the successes that piled-up once Hollywood figured out that he did a better job creating novels that could become great films than just about anybody in fiction.

He could have been a third generation West Texas rancher, and did his share of riding and fence-mending and cattle work growing up. But Larry McMurtry came along just after that cattle era had passed, living not just on a ranch but with men and women worn down by the work, wondering where their way of life had gone. McMurtry made his reputation on stories about that soon to vanish or vanished world, from “Horseman Pass By,” which became “Hud,” to “The Last Picture Show,” set basically in his hometown on its death bed, all the way to a real cattle drive Western, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove.”

As Daughterty quotes McMurtry as recognizing, his gift for characters, colorful, natural dialogue and settings set him apart from the pack and brought producers, screenwriters and directors to his door, time and again over his long life and career, which ended with his death in 2021 at age 84.

Daugherty psychoanalyzes McMurtry’s love-hate relationship with Texas, Texans, Hollywood and the American literary heirarchy.

With book after book and film after film showing a great sensitivity and appreciation for female characters, Daugherty details the writer’s lifetime of love affairs, crushes and creative collaborations with women — among them Polly Platt, wife and under-credited collaborator with her husband Peter Bogdanovich, who ditched Platt when Peter B. took up with model-starlet Cybil Shepherd while filming “The Last Picture Show” in desolate Archer City and environs.

We’re treated to large samples from McMurtry’s correspondence. He was an early pal and somewhat friendly competitor with Ken Kesey before “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” an open-hearted love letter writer, with his long missives breaking down his first marriage, his crush on his first agent, and Kesey’s wife, whom he later married, among his extensive archive.

And Daugherty recalls this most bookish of writer’s quiet, observant and sometimes curmudgeonly persona, a serious novelist of popular fiction that often transcended its genre and became true literary fiction — taught in the same academia he labored in, against his will, between books until Hollywood started paying his bills.

L.A. was “like working in a city filled with immensely attractive children,” McMurtry opined. “The people, who have all the power and the all the money and a portion of the charm, also have the patience spans of two-year-olds.”

McMurtry leaned into the “Texan” thing as his brand, even as he moved from coast to coast and acquired a true Man of Letters reputation, not just an academic but as a book-hound who found an outlet for his mania, opening book stores and collecting and selling rare titles, erotica and even historical pornography. He rose to great popularity, and when he accepted that Oscar for co-writing “Brokeback Mountain,” he made damned sure he took the stage wearing Levis and boots.

I didn’t remember all the books that were optioned for movies (“Leaving Cheyenne” became “Loving Molly,” which slipped by me, and most everybody else). I had no idea about the man’s obsessive book collecting. But I read this because I wanted to understand my one not-wholly satisfying encounter with the Great Writer, an interview I did with him just after “Lonesome Dove,” the novel, came out.

He was difficult to nail down for the assignment and I ended up catching him at a University of North Dakota cocktail party in his honor, interviewing him on a sofa as we kept being interrupted by academic wellwishers, groupies and insiders from the writer’s conference where he was to speak. McMurtry came off as shy, aloof and reluctant, and if he stayed long enough to give that reading/lecture I don’t have any memory of it.

I want to say he took ill and fled, but maybe he had the good manners to at least wait until after his talk. I barely got the story into print — I was freelancing for a newspaper while working at the university’s NPR radio station — before he was gone. If memory serves, organizers were surprised and taken aback, and kind of wishing they’d managed to land North Dakota’s own Western novelist for the masses, Louis L’Amour.

I gather from the book that Daughtery had an early encounter similar to mine, a guy who liked lecture and appearance fees but had a certain reluctance about doing them that was also a big part of who he was — ambivalent. At least we got to chat about the perceived difficulties of filming “Lonesome Dove” (it may have been optioned for TV, but it wasn’t yet in production). The man knew his cattle and assured me that enough real Texas longhorns could be found to make his “Red River” saga.

There’s a little about where this or that character might have come from, not much about the writer’s process, as McMurtry didn’t talk much about that. And the love life details, with bios of the women, give “exhaustive” a bad name.

But Daugherty fills pages with gossip, anecdotes and droll observations — his, McMurtry’s, friends and critics of the writer, actors and others.

Critic David Hickey, speaking of McMurtry’s arm’s-length embrace of home state, Texas — “Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.”

Saving Paul Newman from doing a chore even experienced cattlemen dreaded and feared on “Hud,” dealing with mercurial Polly Platt, who wanted to write, director and produce “Terms of Endearment” because McMurtry had picked up on the quirks of her relationship with her own daughter in writing it, as Platt dumped water all over Debra Winger in a fight (possible over director James L. Brooks), there’s a lot of detail in this thorough biography of a writer who jokingly found himself worrying, late in his oft-filmed literary career, “where the next million was coming from.”

“Larry McMurtry: A Life,” by Traccy Daugherty. St. Martin’s Press. 550 pages, including index and notes. $35.