Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry (born June 3, 1936, Wichita Falls, Texas, U.S.—died March 25, 2021, Tucson, Arizona) was an award-winning American writer noted for his novels set on the frontier, in contemporary small towns, and in increasingly urbanized and industrial areas of Texas. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, and the National Humanities Medal for his work.

Early life, education, and bookstore

The son of a rancher, McMurtry was raised in Archer City, Texas, a place he once described as “a bookless town, in a bookless part of the state.” Cowboying was a tradition in his family, but he had no interest in participating in it. As it was, McMurtry grew up as that tradition was changing considerably from the rancher’s life depicted in western novels and movies, with pick-up trucks replacing horses and corporate farms replacing cattle drives. From a young age McMurtry preferred books, reading anything he could get his hands on.

McMurtry was educated at North Texas State College (now University of North Texas; B.A., 1958) and Rice University (M.A., 1960). He spent one year (1960–61) at Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow, studying creative writing under Irish writer Frank O’Connor alongside Ken Kesey and Peter Beagle.

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For the next decade McMurtry worked as a teacher. He was an instructor at Texas Christian University (1961–62), a lecturer in English and creative writing at Rice University (1963–69), and a visiting professor at George Mason College (1970) and American University (1970–71). In 1971 McMurtry opened a shop specializing in rare books in Washington, D.C. He also opened a bookstore in Archer City in 1988 and began the process of remaking the “bookless town” into a “book town,” eventually requiring four storefronts to house all the volumes he had added. In 2012 he held a massive auction that sold off some 300,000 titles.

Novels

McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961; filmed as Hud with Paul Newman in the lead role in 1963), is set in the Texas ranching country in the 1950s in the fictional town of Thalia (modeled on Archer City). The isolation and claustrophobia of small-town life are examined in The Last Picture Show (1966). The novel’s unsentimental realism shocked his hometown. In 1971 it was adapted into a film directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, and Cloris Leachman. McMurtry received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay. The novel was the first in a series that he continued with Texasville (1987), Duane’s Depressed (1999), When the Light Goes (2007), and Rhino Ranch (2009).

McMurtry’s frontier epic, Lonesome Dove (1985), centers on aging ex-Texas Rangers who lead a cattle drive from the Rio Grande in Texas to Montana. The idea for the novel originated in the 1970s, when McMurtry and Bogdanovich attempted to woo James Stewart, John Wayne, and Henry Fonda into starring in a film with a similar plot. Wayne rejected the proposal, which brought the idea to a dead end, but a decade later McMurtry resurrected it for a novel that would dismantle romantic notions of the Old West. Despite many episodes that depict the brutal violence of the frontier and the environmental destruction wreaked by white settlers, the novel was embraced as a classic western, and it is credited with helping to revive the genre.

Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, and in 1989 it was made into an acclaimed television miniseries starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Anjelica Huston, Diane Lane, Danny Glover, and Chris Cooper. A sequel, Streets of Laredo, appeared in 1993; Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997) are prequels.

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Shifting from tales of small-town life, McMurtry focused on urban Houstonians in Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), and Terms of Endearment (1975). The last of these was adapted in 1983 into an Academy Award-winning film, directed by James L. Brooks and starring Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson, and Debra Winger. In 1992 McMurtry published The Evening Star, a sequel to the book (film 1996).

McMurtry’s other novels include Leaving Cheyenne (1963; filmed as Lovin’ Molly, 1974), Cadillac Jack (1982), The Desert Rose (1983), Buffalo Girls (1990; television miniseries 1995), Zeke and Ned (1997), Sin Killer (2002), Loop Group (2004), and The Last Kind Words Saloon (2014).

Other screenplays, nonfiction books, and memoirs

With Diana Ossana, McMurtry won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005), based on Annie Proulx’s short story of the same name. He also wrote episodes of the TV miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan (1988) and the screenplays for the films Falling from Grace (1992) and Joe Bell (2020; with Ossana), among other projects.

McMurtry wrote prolifically on nonfictional subjects as well. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968) is a collection of ruminations on the unique character and evolving demography of his home state. Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (2001) contains a broad range of meditations on Western figures and concepts. He chronicled some of the savage episodes that occurred during the period of American Western expansion in Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West, 1846–1890 (2005). The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America (2005) traces the history of William F. Cody’s Wild West show. McMurtry also wrote the biographies Crazy Horse (1999), about the Sioux chief Crazy Horse, and Custer (2012), about ill-fated Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.

McMurtry related aspects of his own life in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond (1999), Books: A Memoir (2008), Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways (2000), Paradise (2002), Literary Life: A Second Memoir (2009), and Hollywood: A Third Memoir (2010).

Additional honors and personal life

From 1989 to 1991 McMurtry served as president of PEN America, the U.S. branch of an international organization devoted to promoting good will among writers and defending free speech. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in 2015.

McMurtry was married twice. In 1959 he wed Jo Ballard Scott; they had a son, James, before divorcing several years later. In 2011 he married Norma Faye Kesey, the widow of writer Ken Kesey (who died in 2001). Ossana, with whom McMurtry maintained a long friendship and writing partnership, shared a home with McMurtry and his second wife.

McMurtry died of congestive heart failure in 2021; he was 84.