Pulitzer-winning Western author who co-wrote ‘Brokeback Mountain’ script
Larry McMurtry, a prolific novelist and screenwriter who demythologized the American West with his unromantic depictions of life on the 19th-century frontier and in contemporary small-town Texas, died Thursday at his home in Archer City, Texas.He was 84.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Diana Ossana, his friend and writing partner.
Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with Ms. Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006.
But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with “Lonesome Dove,” a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television miniseries.
Mr. McMurtry wrote “Lonesome Dove” as an antiWestern, a rebuke of sorts to the romantic notions of dimestore novels and an exorcism of the false ghosts in the work of writers like Louis L’Amour.
“I’m a critic of the myth of the cowboy,” he told an interviewer in 1988. “I don’t feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it.”
But readers warmed to the vivid characters in “Lonesome Dove.” Mr. McMurtry himself ultimately likened it, in terms of its sweep, to a Western “Gone With the Wind.”
Mr. McMurtry was the son of a rancher, and the realism in his books extended to the Texas he knew as a young man. His first novel, “Horseman, Pass By” (1961), examined the values of the Old West as they came into conflict with the modern world.
Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, Texas historian Wayne Gard wrote, “The cow hands ride horses less often than pickup trucks or Cadillacs. And in the evening, instead of sitting around a campfire
strumming guitars and singing, ‘Git along, little dogie,’ they are more likely to have a game at the pool hall, drink beer and try their charms on any girls they can find.”
He added that Mr. McMurtry had “not only a sharp ear for dialogue but a gift of expression that easily could blossom in more important works.”
From the start of his career, Mr. McMurtry’s books were attractive to filmmakers. “Horseman, Pass By” was made into “Hud,” directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman. His funny, elegiac and sexually frank coming-of-age novel “The Last Picture Show” (1966) was made into a 1971 film of the same title starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie of his 1975 novel “Terms of Endearment,” directed by James L. Brooks and starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson, won the Academy Award for best picture of 1983.
Mr. McMurtry relished his role as a literary outsider. Helived for much of his life in his hometown, Archer City, two hours northwest of Dallas. He had the same postal box for nearly 70 years. When he walked onstage to accept his Oscar for “Brokeback Mountain,” he wore jeans and cowboy boots below his dinner jacket. He reminded audiences that the screenplay was an adaptation of a shortstory by Ms. Proulx.
Yet Mr. McMurtry was a plugged-in man of American letters. For two years in the early 1990s, he was American president of PEN, the august literary and human rights organization. He was a regular contributor to The New York Reviewof Books, where he often wrote on topics relating to
the American West. His friends included writer Susan Sontag, whom he once took to a stock car race.
For some 50 years, Mr. McMurtry was also a serious antiquarian bookseller. His bookstore in Archer City, Booked Up, is one of America’s largest; it once occupied six buildings and contained some 400,000 volumes. In 2012, Mr McMurtry auctioned off two-thirds of those books and planned to consolidate.
His private library alone held some 30,000 books and was spread over three houses. He called compiling it a life’s work, “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves.”
Larry Jeff McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, on June 3, 1936, to Hazel Ruth and William Jefferson McMurtry. His father was a rancher. The family lived in what Larry McMurtry called a “bookless ranch house” outside of Archer City and later in the town itself.
He graduated from North Texas State University in 1958 and married Jo Ballard Scott a year later. The couple had a son, James, now a well-regarded singer and songwriter, before divorcing in 1966.
In 2011, he married Norma Faye Kesey, novelist Ken Kesey’s widow, and she moved in with Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana.
“I went up and drug Faye out of Oregon,” he told Grantland.com. “I think I had seen Faye a total of four times over 51 years, and I married her. We never had a date or a conversation. Ken would never let me have conversations with her.”
In addition to his wife and his son, Mr. McMurtry is survived by two sisters, Sue Deen and Judy McLemore; a brother, Charlie; and a grandson.