Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry
Born	Larry Jeff McMurtry June 3, 1936 (1936-06-03) Archer City, Texas
Education	University of North Texas Rice University
Occupation	Novelist, screenwriter, essayist
Years active	1963-present

Larry Jeff McMurtry (born June 3, 1936) is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas. He is known for his 1975 novel Terms of Endearment, his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, a historical saga that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive their cattle from the Rio Grande to a new home in the frontier of Montana, and for co-writing the adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries and both the films of Terms of Endearment and Brokeback Mountain won Academy Awards. He also awarded Brian Allen Carr the inaugural Texas Observer Story Prize.

Early life

McMurtry was born in Archer City, 25 miles from Wichita Falls, Texas, the son of Hazel Ruth (née McIver) and William Jefferson McMurtry, who was a rancher. He grew up on a ranch outside Archer City, Texas, which is the model for the town of Thalia that appears in much of his fiction. He earned degrees from University of North Texas (B.A. 1958) and Rice University (M.A. 1960).

Career

McMurtry has won the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters on three occasions; in 1962, for Horseman, Pass By; in 1967, for The Last Picture Show, which he shared with Tom Pendleton's The Iron Orchard; and in 1986, for Lonesome Dove. He has also won the Amon G. Carter award for periodical prose in 1966, for Texas: Good Times Gone or Here Again?. In 1964 he was awarded a Guggenheim grant. In 1960, McMurtry was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he studied the craft of fiction under novelist Wallace Stegner and alongside a number of other writers, including Ken Kesey, Peter S. Beagle, Robert Stone, and Gordon Lish. McMurtry and Kesey remained friends after McMurtry left California and returned to Texas, and Kesey's famous cross-country trip with his Merry Pranksters in a day-glo painted schoolbus 'Further' included a stop at McMurtry's home in Houston, described in Tom Wolfe's New-Journalistic book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At the time (1964), McMurtry was also a Lecturer in English at Rice University. His students were entertained with stories of Hollywood and the filming of Hud for which he was consulting.

While at Stanford he became a rare-book scout, and during his years in Houston managed a book store there called the Bookman. In 1969 he moved to the Washington, D.C. area, and in 1970 with two partners started a bookshop in Georgetown which he named Booked Up. In 1988 he opened another Booked Up in Archer City, which is one of the largest single used bookstores in the United States, carrying somewhere 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 an outpouring of public support.

One of McMurtry's bookstores in Archer City, Texas

Just one of the dozens of aisles of books at Booked Up in Archer City, Texas

Leo the store cat at Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, March 29, 2010

McMurtry has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and is a past president of PEN. He is perhaps best known for the film adaptations of his work, especially Hud (from the novel Horseman, Pass By), starring Paul Newman and Patricia Neal; the Peter Bogdanovich–directed The Last Picture Show; James L. Brooks's Terms of Endearment, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture (1984); and Lonesome Dove, which became a popular television mini-series starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.

In 1986, McMurtry received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

In 2006, he was co-winner (with Diana Ossana) of both the Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. He accepted his Oscar wearing jeans and cowboy boots along with his dinner jacket and used his speech to promote books by reminding his audience that "Brokeback Mountain" was a short story by E. Annie Proulx before it was a movie. In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, he paid tribute to his Swiss-made Hermes 3000 typewriter.

Personal life

His son, James McMurtry, is a singer/songwriter and guitarist. His former wife Jo Scott McMurtry, an English professor, is also the author of five books. On May 5, 2011, the Dallas Morning News reported that McMurtry married Norma Faye Kesey, the widow of writer Ken Kesey, on April 29 in a civil ceremony in Archer City.

Books, novels and films

• 1961: Horseman, Pass By—adapted for film as Hud
• 1963: Leaving Cheyenne—adapted for film as Lovin' Molly
• 1966: The Last Picture Show—adapted into a film of the same name
• 1968: In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
• 1970: Moving On—This 1970 book was given high reviews by several women's organizations for its unflinching depiction of the main character Patsy Carpenter (who later appears in All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, Terms of Endearment, and The Evening Star)
• 1972: All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers—a continuation of characters from Moving On
• 1974: It's Always We Rambled (essay)
• 1975: Terms of Endearment—a continuation of characters from Moving On and All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers—adapted into a film of the same name
• 1978: Somebody's Darling—a continuation of the character Jill Peel from All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers
• 1982: Cadillac Jack
• 1983: Desert Rose
• 1985: Lonesome Dove, 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner, and first of what became a series
• 1987: Texasville—adapted into a film of the same name, and a continuation of the story begun in The Last Picture Show
• 1987: Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood
• 1988: Anything For Billy
• 1988: The Murder of Mary Phagan—TV story
• 1989: Some Can Whistle—a continuation of the story begun in All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.
• 1990: Buffalo Girls—adapted into a TV movie
• 1990: Montana—TV movie
• 1992: The Evening Star—adapted for film as The Evening Star and a continuation of the story begun in Terms of Endearment and Moving On and All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers
• 1992: Memphis—TV movie
• 1992: Falling from Grace
• 1993: Streets of Laredo, another in the Lonesome Dove series
• 1994: Pretty Boy Floyd (with Diana Ossana)
• 1995: Dead Man's Walk, another in the Lonesome Dove series
• 1995: The Late Child—a continuation of the story begun in Desert Rose
• 1997: Comanche Moon, the last as of 2007 of the Lonesome Dove series
• 1997: Zeke and Ned (with Diana Ossana)
• 1999: Crazy Horse: A Life (biography)
• 1999: Duane's Depressed—A continuation of The Last Picture Show and Texasville story
• 1999: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
• 1999: Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories
• 2000: Roads: Driving America's Great Highways
• 2000: Boone's Lick
• 2001: Sacagawea's Nickname—essays on the American West
• 2002: Sin Killer—The Berrybender Narratives, Book 1
• 2002: Paradise
• 2002: Johnson County War—TV mini-series
• 2003: The Wandering Hill—The Berrybender Narratives, Book 2
• 2003: By Sorrow's River—The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3
• 2004: Folly and Glory: A Novel—The Berrybender Narratives, Book 4
• 2005: Brokeback Mountain (with Diana Ossana)—Oscar-winning screenplay (adapted from the short story by E. Annie Proulx)
• 2005: The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley & the Beginnings of Superstardom in America (May)
• 2005: Oh What A Slaughter! : Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890
• 2005: Loop Group
• 2006: Telegraph Days: A Novel
• 2007: When The Light Goes—A continuation of The Last Picture Show, Texasville, and Duane's Depressed story
• 2008: Books: A Memoir
• 2009: Rhino Ranch: A Novel (Aug)—Last book of the The Last Picture Show, Texasville, Duane's Depressed, and When The Light Goes story
• 2009: Literary Life: A Second Memoir
• 2010: Boone's Lick—McMurtry will be^{[citation needed]} co-writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of his 2000 novel
• 2011: Hollywood: A Third Memoir

See also

• Frank Q. Dobbs

External links

• Larry McMurtry Collection, from the Rare Book & Texana Collections, University of North Texas website
• McMurtry, Larry. "The Author Who Sold Books", Washingtonian, August 1, 2008.
• Larry McMurtry Papers 1984-1991, from the Texas State University-San Marcos website
• Larry McMurtry at the Internet Movie Database
• Larry McMurtry at the Open Directory Project
• The Treasure Hunter Michael Dirda review of McMurtry's Books: A Memoir from The New York Review of Books
• Larry McMurtry screenplays, 1979-1988 and undated, in the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University