New Journalism writer’s story inspired ‘Urban Cowboy’
Aaron Latham, a magazine writer whose stylish dispatch from the ringside of a mechanical bull at a Texas honkytonk saloon inspired “Urban Cowboy,” the 1980 film that evoked the modern American West and became the most noted credit in his wide-ranging literary career, died July 23 at a hospital in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 78.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Lesley Stahl, the longtime correspondent for the CBS News program “60 Minutes.”
Latham was a strapping Texan who made his name on the East Coast in the 1970s, embarking on his magazine career when the movement known as New Journalism was in florescence. He played softball with Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese — more senior practitioners of the form — and wrote for Clay S. Felker, the founder of New York Magazine, at both New York Magazine and Esquire.
It was Felker who sent Latham back home to Texas, to a bar called
Aaron Latham
Gilley’s in the Houston suburbs, to write the article published in Esquire in 1978 as “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s Search for True Grit.”
Latham delivered a vervy narrative — straight from the school of New Journalism — of petrochemical workers who traded their hard hats for cowboy hats and mounted a bucking mechanical bull, clinging not only to the beast but also to what Latham described as a vanishing “cowboy code.”
Latham endured what he described as a “rainy season” of his soul when several writing projects failed and he fell into depression that he said brought him nearly to suicide. He emerged from his depression, he said, by writing “The Frozen Leopard: Hunting My Dark Heart in Africa” (1991), a travelogue of a safari during which he confronted existential questions of life.
He later wrote a trilogy of Western novels,
“Code of the West” (2001), “The Cowboy With the Tiffany Gun” (2003) and “Riding With John Wayne” (2006).
Both his parents were teachers. His mother wrote and illustrated children’s books.
“She raised me with the idea that writers were the great heroes of the world,” Latham told Texas Monthly, “and I wanted to be my mother’s hero.”