Larry McMurtry

American · 1936 to 2021

Born Larry Jeff McMurtry on 3 June 1936 in Wichita Falls, Texas, he grew up on a cattle ranch outside Archer City, the son and grandson of ranchers, in a house that held no books at all until a cousin passing through in 1942 left him a box of nineteen boys' adventure stories. He took a bachelor's degree at North Texas State College in 1958 and a master's at Rice in 1960, then spent a year at Stanford on a Wallace Stegner fellowship in the class that included Ken Kesey. Horseman, Pass By (1961), written while he was still a student, was filmed as Hud two years later; The Last Picture Show (1966), his unsparing portrait of a dying Texas town, became Peter Bogdanovich's film of 1971; Terms of Endearment (1975) reached the screen in 1983. Lonesome Dove, a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana that had spent twelve years as an unproduced screenplay written for John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, was published in 1985 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following April. He was a bookseller for most of his life, opening Booked Up in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., with Marcia Carter in 1971 and moving its stock in 1988 to several empty buildings around the courthouse square in Archer City, where it grew to some 400,000 volumes, and he served as president of PEN American Center from 1989 to 1991, the years of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. With Diana Ossana he shared the Academy Award for the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain in 2006. His first marriage, to Jo Ballard Scott in 1959, produced a son, the songwriter James McMurtry; in 2011 he married Norma Faye Kesey, Ken Kesey's widow. He wrote more than thirty novels, some fifteen books of essays and memoir and more than forty screenplays, five typed pages every morning on a Hermes 3000, and died of heart failure on 25 March 2021 at his home in Tucson, Arizona, aged eighty-four.