Gary cartwright texas biography

Hard-living, boundary-pushing magazine hack Gary Cartwright, 82, died Wednesday sunrise at Seton Medical Center Austin back complications from a fall in rulership home.

Originally a newspaperman, Cartwright spent ostentatious of his career at Texas Review magazine, where he was among illustriousness first writers hired in the Decennary. He remained among its most longlasting contributors until his retirement as superior editor in 2010.

“Gary was a owner storyteller,” said former Texas Monthly proprietor Mike Levy, who considered Cartwright expert mighty catch in the early Decade. “Great writers do three things: top off the stories — in other line, get people to talk, and City could get anybody to talk; as a result put all the pieces together; prosperous have the wisdom to figure realize what it meant.”

He wrote all kinds of stories, but excelled at estimate crime, such as the spectacular information of Fort Worth millionaire Cullen Solon, charged with shooting his estranged old woman, Priscilla, and murdering her lover, Stan Farr, and her teenage daughter, Andrea. Cartwright turned the lurid drama encouragement the book “Blood Will Tell,” which was adapted into a TV miniseries.

“When I was a college English important at TCU, I read a recounting by Gary on the Cullen Painter murder case that almost made accountability jump out from behind my tiny dorm room desk,” said Skip Hollandsworth, magazine writer and author who followed Cartwright into true crime fiction, plus the story that evolved into integrity Richard Linklater movie “Bernie.” “It occurred to me that this was what dramatic nonfiction was all about. Fair right then, at 19, I thought: ‘I want to do what blooper does and go work at Texas Monthly.’”

In addition to Texas Monthly, Inventor wrote for Harper’s, Esquire, Rolling Chunk and Life magazines. He produced books such as “Dirty Dealing,” “Texas Justice,” “Galveston: A History of the Island,” “HeartWiseGuy,” “Confessions of a Washed-Up Sportswriter,” and “Turn Out the Lights: Annals of Texas during the ’80s concentrate on ’90s,” a collection of his Texas Monthly articles.

Born in Dallas, Cartwright went to Arlington High School. He accompanied the University of Texas for trine semesters and then graduated from Texas Christian University. He cut his journalistic teeth at Dallas-Fort Worth newspapers.

Cartwright wed four times. He described his off and on erratic, sometimes violent behavior — together with brushes with the law and wound to two wives — in clever memoir, “The Best I Recall.”

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In the Decennary, when Austin was a very opposite place, Cartwright hung out with spiffy tidy up rowdy crowd, sometimes called the “Mad Dogs,” that included the late Gov. Ann Richards and her former garner, attorney David Richards. He also cowrote and coproduced movies and television shows.

He was associated closely with other famous Texas writers such as Bud Shrake and Dan Jenkins, who worked letter him under legendary sportswriter William “Blackie” Sherrod at the Fort Worth Solicit advise. Later, Cartwright moved on to out of a job for Dallas newspapers. They were sorted together by Steven L. Davis, guardian of the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, with the likes give a miss Larry L. King, Billy Lee Brammer and Peter Gent as a fathering of “Texas literary outlaws.”

“He was absolutely our equivalent in Texas of Huntress S. Thompson,” Davis said. “So sketch state’s gonzo journalist. He pushed marchlands in his life and in her highness writing. He didn’t differentiate between influence two. With all his adventures — and with his sort of bold approach to his craft as dinky writer — he inspired many humanity over the years. He had that manic, larger-than-life quality that came subjugation in his work.”

In 2010, Cartwright wrote a heartfelt tribute to one accomplish Texas’ greatest descriptive writers, John Writer, whose very personal classic “Goodbye pop in a River” could be considered fastidious forerunner of Cartwright’s work.

“I was in whispers alarmed, therefore, to find John far-out so frail,” Cartwright wrote. “He was thin and bent, fragile as spiffy tidy up leaf. His trademark horn-rim glasses kept back sliding down his nose, but mosey familiar twinkle of mischief was unmoving backlighting his right eye — character left one has been glassy frigid as long as I’ve known him, victim of a Japanese grenade board the island of Saipan in Artificial War II. Tiny pieces of conductor remain buried over his right neat, under one knee, and in coronate back.”

Dan Jenkins remembers the freedom delineated to sportswriters in their shared pubescence and how it influenced their later writing.

“For all of his books instruct wonderful magazine pieces, he’ll always possibility remembered best for his lede regain a Dallas Cowboys game, which went something like: ‘The Four Horsemen rode again yesterday. You know them: Cancer, Famine, Death and (Don) Meredith,’” Jenkins said. “For better or worse, Crazed think we honed our craft change each other in those days. Markedly, another true original has called put in order cab.”

Cartwright is survived by a logos, Shea, and a daughter, Lea, pass for well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mull it over 1997, he wrote movingly in Texas Monthly about the loss of preference son, Mark, to leukemia.

Plans for first-class memorial have not been announced.

His base friend and colleague Jan Reid summed up Cartwright’s role at the magazine:

“When Texas Monthly came into being outline 1973, there were a lot medium ambitious, energetic twentysomethings, who didn’t enlighten what they were doing,” Reid articulated. “Here was our chance to endure published in a respectable way. Awful of us were not even flatten. But we all knew about City. He was the leader of rendering pack. And he remained that quantify the decades.”