Crazy Horse: A Life

McMurtry wrote Crazy Horse following a period of literary malaise, precipitated by heart bypass surgery. A profile in The Wall Street Journal noted that he "recovered a sense of himself as a writer only after he began" working on the book, writing by long hand.^[3]

Peter Aykroyd of The New York Times wrote "Crazy Horse remains a figure trapped in a history that he himself only partly understood, and the narrative must essentially remain at the level of supposition rather than of truth. McMurtry is good at the less intimate moments, however, when he suggests that mutual incomprehension between white settlers and Indians led to sporadic and at first inconclusive warfare. And this apparently objective story is striated with the gleams and intimations of the novelist shrouded within the biographer."^[4]