[McMURTRY, Larry (1936-2021), his copy]. KESEY, Ken (1935-2001), editor. Spit in the Ocean “Old in the Streets” Issue 1, Volume 1. Pleasant Hill, OR: Intrepid Trips Information Service, 1974.
8vo. Illustrated from photographs. Original pictorial wrappers (front cover unevenly sunned, vertical crease, with mailing labels and stamps addressed to Larry McMurtry at Booked Up on rear cover). Provenance: Larry McMurtry (his bookplate, which he designed, features the horseshoe-shaped brand his father and grandfather used on the McMurtry cattle), from his personal library at his home in Archer City.
FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED BY KESEY TO McMURTRY: “Dear Larry: Its raining, I mean its fucking raining!! The worst most depressing downtrodding disponding [sic] winter we’ve ever endured. The ground is leeched empty. The cows are thin and rain burned. With this new crop of calves I now got 26 head including Gull. I hear them better now… Ken”. [With:] a second copy inscribed by the executive editor Ken Babbs to McMurtry asking how many copies he would like for his bookstore. McMurtry and Kesey became lifelong friends beginning when both were classmates in the graduate writing program at Stanford University in 1960. McMurtry and Kesey maintained their friendship over the years, but both were competitive with each other. “Twenty-five years later, by chance, I won a Pulitzer Prize for ‘Lonesome Dove’, after which my times with Ken were never quite the same. In time, if he had continued to write, he probably would have won a Pulitzer, too” (Jeff Baker, in The Oregonian, 9 May 2011). On 29 April 2011, McMurtry married Kesey’s widow, Norma Faye Kesey in a civil ceremony in Archer City.