‘LONESOME’ LOSS
McMurtry, writer of western classics, was 84
Larry McMurtry, the prolific American writer who reinterpreted the western genre and won a Pulitzer Prize for “Lonesome Dove” and an Oscar for “Brokeback Mountain,” has died at age 84.
He died Thursday night from heart failure at his home, his spokeswoman, Amanda Lundberg, confirmed to the Daily News.
His wife Norma Faye, his writing partner Diana Ossana, his son James and his grandson Curtis were among the loved ones at his bedside, Lundberg said.
McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels including “The Last Picture Show” in 1966 and “Terms of Endearment” in 1975, which both were adapted into Oscar-winning films.
In 2006, he and Ossana won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain,” their film version of E. Annie Proulx’s short story about a tortured love affair between two cowboys.
Born in a small Texas town in 1936 to a family of cattle ranchers, McMurtry is best known for “Lonesome Dove,” his sprawling 843-page novel about retired Texas
Rangers and the harsh realities of their exploits driving a herd of stolen cattle from Texas to Montana.
It won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and was adapted into a 1989 TV miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones that won seven Emmy Awards.
McMurtry later said he didn’t watch the miniseries and wrote the underlying novel as an
“anti-Western.”
“Would you like your menfolk to be that way? The Western myth is a heroic myth, and yet settling the West was not heroic,” he told Mother Jones in a 2014 interview.
McMurtry’s longtime editor Michael Korda said his passing marked a profound loss for American literature.
“I refer to ‘Lonesome Dove’ as the ‘Moby Dick’ of the plains. He managed to personify the West and turn it into amazing fiction without glamorizing it,” Korda told The News.
“He had a Dickensian and Tolstoy-like ability to tell stories on a huge scale, and unlike most men at his level, he was wonderful at depicting women in a convincing and sympathetic way,” Korda said.
“I don’t think I ever edited any writer whom I felt so fond of as Larry, and I don’t know that I’ve ever edited a fiction writer who had such a wonderful leap of ability to go beyond anything before.”
McMurtry was also known as a serious book collector and the founder of Booked Up, his massive bookstore in Archer City, Texas, which has a population of less than 2,000 people.
One fan recalled visiting the store in a Facebook post Friday.
“I will never forget him letting me see his Oscar and Golden Globe for ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ There was one condition. He said I had to name the actress who gave ‘Oscar’ his name. I immediately said, ‘Bette Davis when she won for “All About Eve.” ’ He smiled and opened the case,” Dawson Hicks wrote.