Larry Jeff McMurtry (June 3, 1936 – March 25, 2021) was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. During a career spanning six decades, he wrote more than thirty novels, numerous essays and memoirs, and approximately fifty screenplays. Films adapted from McMurtry's works earned 34 Academy Award nominations with 13 wins, and his novels were the basis for several television miniseries.
McMurtry's early novels, including Horseman, Pass By (1961), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975), examined the decline of small-town and rural Texas life; all three were adapted into major films. His 1985 book Lonesome Dove, often considered his magnum opus, won the Pulitzer Prize. The novel, which follows several retired Texas Rangers on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, was one of the most popular American novels of the late twentieth century, and it was adapted into a popular television miniseries. The subsequent three novels in his Lonesome Dove series were also adapted as miniseries. He later won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005) alongside his longtime writing partner, Diana Ossana.
In addition to his literary career, McMurtry was one of the United States' most prominent antiquarian booksellers. He operated bookstores in Washington, D.C., and Archer City, Texas, where he amassed a stock of nearly half a million volumes. As president of PEN American from 1989 to 1991, he was an advocate for free speech. In 2014, he received the National Humanities Medal.
Early life and education McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1936, the eldest of four children of Hazel Ruth (née McIver) and William Jefferson (Jeff Mac) McMurtry. His grandfather, father, and uncles were ranchers, and he lived on his grandparents' ranch until he was six. In his memoir Books, McMurtry recalled that there were no books on the ranch, but his extended family would sit on the front porch every night and tell stories. In 1942, McMurtry's cousin Robert Hilburn stopped by the ranch house on his way to enlist for World War II, and left a box containing 19 boys' adventure books from the 1930s. The first book he read was Sergeant Silk: The Prairie Scout. His family then moved to the nearby town of Archer City, Texas, for more space. The small town later served as the model for the fictional town of Thalia, the setting for many of his novels.
McMurtry graduated from high school in 1954, one of 19 seniors. His father wanted him to pursue veterinary medicine at Texas A&M, but he did not have an interest in animals. For an undergraduate degree, he initially attended Rice University in Houston for three semesters but struggled with mathematics classes, including algebra and calculus. He transferred to the University of North Texas in Denton, where he took courses in creative writing and befriended his classmate Grover Lewis. McMurtry wrote several poems and short stories during his studies, and alongside Lewis, he created a campus magazine called the Coexistence Review, in which he published early excerpts of what would become his first novel, Horseman, Pass By. He also contributed to a literary magazine, The Avesta. He earned a BA from the University of North Texas in 1958 and an MA from Rice University in 1960.
Career
Early work In 1958, the Southwest Review accepted a poem from McMurtry, his first publication in a major journal. During the 1960–1961 academic year, McMurtry was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he studied the craft of fiction under Frank O'Connor and Malcolm Cowley, alongside other aspiring writers, including Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Peter S. Beagle and Gurney Norman. His debut novel, Horseman, Pass By, was published in 1961. The fictional setting of the novel, Thalia, resembled McMurtry's hometown of Archer City, Texas. The coming of age novel chronicles the demise of the Old West from the perspective of Lonnie Bannon. In a review for The New York Times, Wayne Gard wrote that "McMurtry has not only a sharp ear for dialogue but a gift of expression that easily could blossom in more important works." The novel was adapted into the film, starring Paul Newman. McMurtry left California and returned to Texas to take a year-long composition instructorship at Texas Christian University, where he continued to develop his next novels. McMurtry's next two novels Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1966), were also set in Thalia and adapted into films.
In 1963, he returned to Rice University, where he served as a lecturer in English until 1969, and a visiting professor at George Mason College (1970) and American University (1970–71). In 1964, McMurtry was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He next produced a series of novels set in Houston with recurring characters. These included Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), and Terms of Endearment (1975). In The New Yorker, Rachel Monroe described these books as "entertaining but uneven books that swing from slapstick to pathos". Terms of Endearment was adapted by James L. Brooks into a 1983 film that won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Thomas Powers, writing in The New York Review of Books, considered Moving On McMurtry's finest early work, calling it "a convincing portrait of the deepening silence between men and women left by the long collapse of Texas ranching culture". McMurtry was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Lonesome Dove
Lonesome Dove originated as a screenplay idea developed by McMurtry and director Peter Bogdanovich, with John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda in mind for casting as aging cowboys. The movie was not developed but McMurtry repurposed the idea into a novel about two retired Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, who lead a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana. The novel was a commercial and critical success, selling over 4 million copies and winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. George Garrett, writing for the Chicago Tribune, described it as a masterpiece, praising its "authority of exact authenticity" and concluding that it restored the tradition of the Western "by reforming and revising it." McMurtry, however, had a complicated relationship with the novel's reception. He reflected on the book's legacy in Literary Life: A Second Memoir (2009), writing that it was the "Gone With the Wind of the West... a pretty good book; it's not a towering masterpiece." According to his biographer Tracy Daugherty, however, McMurtry privately held a more laudatory view of the book, describing it as the best work he would ever write.
In 1989, the novel was adapted into a popular television miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.
Later years In 1991, McMurtry underwent heart surgery. During his recovery, he suffered severe depression. He recovered at the home of his future writing partner Diana Ossana and wrote his novel Streets of Laredo at her kitchen counter. After surgery, he also wrote Crazy Horse: A Life. 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 hand. Ossana and McMurtry collaborated on the novels Pretty Boy Floyd (1994) and Zeke and Ned (1997), as well as numerous screenplays. His sole-authored books during this period include The Berrybender Narratives, four novels that follow an English hunting party in the American West. In a review of the first volume, Sin Killer (2002), Michiko Kakutani gave an unfavorable review, calling it a "perfunctory, highly formulaic love story" in which McMurtry is "skating along on automatic pilot". Other reviewers shared a similar sentiment regarding the quality of his later novels. Reflecting on McMurtry's prolific output, Dwight Garner stated: "He writes so much that supply outstrips demand. A lot of his stuff verges on being––how to put this?––typed rather than written.”
In 2006, he was co-winner (with Ossana) of both the Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, adapted from a short story by E. Annie Proulx. He accepted his Oscar while wearing a dinner jacket over jeans and cowboy boots. In his speech, he promoted books, reminding the audience the movie was developed from a short story. In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, he paid tribute to his Swiss-made Hermes 3000 typewriter.
Antiquarian bookstore businesses
While at Stanford, McMurtry became a rare-book scout. During his years in Houston, he managed a bookstore called the Bookman. He moved to Washington, D.C. in 1969. Subsequently, in 1970, he started a bookshop in Georgetown with two partners, which he named Booked Up. In 1988, he opened another Booked Up store in Archer City. It became one of the largest antiquarian bookstores in the United States, carrying between 400,000 and 450,000 titles. Citing economic pressures from Internet bookselling, McMurtry came close to shutting down the Archer City store in 2005, but chose to keep it open after great public support.
In early 2012, McMurtry decided to downsize and sell off the greater portion of his inventory. He felt the collection was a liability for his heirs. The auction was conducted on August 10 and 11, 2012, and was overseen by Addison and Sarova Auctioneers of Macon, Georgia. This epic book auction sold books by the shelf, and was billed as "The Last Booksale", in keeping with the title of McMurtry's The Last Picture Show. Dealers, collectors, and gawkers came out en masse from all over the country to witness this historic auction. As stated by McMurtry on the weekend of the sale, "I've never seen that many people lined up in Archer City, and I'm sure I never will again." In April 2006, McMurtry was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Advocacy McMurtry was a vigorous defender of free speech and, while serving as president of PEN American Center (now PEN America) from 1989 to 1991, led the organization's efforts to support Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses (1988) caused a major controversy among some Muslims, with the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issuing a fatwa calling for Rushdie's assassination, after which attempts were made on Rushdie's life.
In 1989, McMurtry testified on behalf of PEN America before the U.S. Congress in opposition to immigration rules in the 1952 McCarran–Walter Act that for decades permitted the visa denial and deportation of foreign writers for ideological reasons. He recounted how before PEN America was to host the 1986 International PEN Congress, "there was a serious question as to whether such a meeting could in fact take place in this country... the McCarran–Walter Act could have effectively prevented such a gathering in the United States." He denounced the relevant rules as "an affront to all who cherish the constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression and association. To a writer whose living depends upon the uninhibited interchange of ideas and experiences, these provisions are especially appalling." Subsequently, some provisions that excluded certain classes of immigrants based on their political beliefs were revoked by the Immigration Act of 1990.
Writing style