Well, fantastic, now I have to find and read some Max Crawford I suppose.

Of course, the main point I took from this bit is that Max Crawford still managed to get published. It just took home longer.

See, you can’t control the timing or the outcome of things (although both are important).

All you can do is show up and do the work.

And forget Percy Lubbock for a second – Max Crawford was born in Lubbock.

I should repeat once more how lucky I was to have begun the struggle for publication at just the right time. If I had sought publication even three years later I would have walked a harder road, as, for example, did the brilliant Texas writer Max Crawford, who took seven years to get his own first novel into print.

-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)