Author a giant of Texas storytelling
LARRY MCMURTRY 1936-2021
Larry Mcmurtry, whose brilliant, poetic and probing stories about the dreamers, the ditherers and the depressed in Texas spanned six decades, has died of congestive heart failure, according to his longtime writing partner, Diana Ossana. He was 84.
Mcmurtry was an elite, erudite yet also understated writer, who sometimes undercut his standing as one of the greatest
Texas storytellers. On multiple occasions, he referred to himself as “a minor regional writer,” a claim that was heartily refuted by his body of work. Mcmurtry wrote over 30 novels and more than 40 books. His “Lonesome Dove” earned him a Pulitzer Prize, and the “Brokeback Mountain” screenplay he co-wrote with friend and collaborator Ossana — an adaptation of an Annie Proulx short story — earned them an Academy Award.
Hollywood found its way to his stories time and again: Mcmurtry novels were the basis for the enduring film classics “Terms of Endearment,” “The Last Picture Show” and “Hud.” For all of Hollywood’s interest in his work, Mcmurtry had a gift for quietly representing modes of life in Texas undergoing change. His debut novel, “Horseman, Pass By,” charted the slow decline of an old rancher and the uncertain future of the teenage grandson who admired him.
Steve Davis, a curator at Texas State University’s Wittliff Collections, said, “Even if ‘Lonesome Dove’ never was written, he’d still be remembered as a giant in Texas literature for his extraordinary early novels. They revolutionized the way Texans view themselves.”
Mcmurtry could make the mundane feel epic through the eyes of his characters, but he always threaded a muted quality through his work. “After school on the weekdays, riding the long road home through the ranches in the old yellow school bus, I watched the range change,” went one of the first paragraphs in “Horseman.” “I watched the whole ranch country shake off its dust and come alive.”
Writer and journalist Lawrence Wright recalled a line from Mcmurtry’s “Leaving Cheyenne” that was the first entry he wrote into a commonplace book of lines he’d admired in other books. “A woman’s love is like the morning dew, just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.”
“It was one of those things so amusing and succinctly expressed that I had to write it down,” Wright said. “He took Texas literature out of this rut. … Maybe it wasn’t a rut, but it felt like Texas had been dying in novels because it was all about the myth. His early work especially about the transition from this mythical past into a much grittier present, where there were cowboys driving pickup trucks. They had women troubles and were moving into modernity reluctantly. That’s the Texas I grew up in, and I’d never seen it in literature before.”
Such documentation about people out of time could, on the surface, feel nostalgic, but that was never Mcmurtry’s point. He was documenting a changing nation, a point he wrote into an introduction to a recently released book that collected his first three novels. He referenced the postworld War II exodus of Americans “from the small towns to the cities.” As a result, he wrote, “the myth of the cowboy grew purer, because there were so few actual cowboys to dispel it.”
Pioneer for Texas literature
Mcmurtry was among the greatest ambassadors for reading, a childhood interest that would become a lifelong pursuit. Mcmurtry ran bookstores in Houston and Archer City, where his family settled nearly 150 years ago. Davis called him “a Johnny
Appleseed for literature in Texas” for his work with bookstores and for the way he spread his papers around to various universities in the state.
But the core of his legacy will be the books he left behind, even if he failed to champion them the way his readers did.
“Understand,” he told Texas Monthly, “that in the silver light of history almost all writers are minor.”
Mcmurtry had misgivings about his own books. But through his distinguished career he braided together poetry, history and contemplation of existence into a rope that pulled together stories that seemed disparate on the surface: “Lonesome Dove” tracked a cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the 1870s; “Terms of Endearment” dealt with a mother and daughter in conflict and connection; “The Last Picture Show” found him in North Texas in the ’50s. In each of these stories, as in his others, Mcmurtry put his characters on some manner of journey, be it a physical trek or the ever-evolving interactions between mother and child or the twisted path toward adulthood.
In 1999, Mcmurtry published “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” a collection of essays subtitled “Reflections at Sixty and Beyond.” In the title essay, he pondered the work of Benjamin, a philosopher and essayist, and expressed anxiety that storytelling traditions were bending toward extinction. Mcmurtry found Panhandle Dairy Queens to be among the last spaces dedicated to such a tradition.
“Storytellers were nearly extinct,” he wrote, “like the whooping cranes, but the DQ was at least the right tide pool in which to observe the few that remained.”
Though reflective about his own work, Mcmurtry’s insistence that he was a “minor regional writer” ignored the breadth and depth of his storytelling gifts. His process was more insular than that of the DQ codgers. But the reach of his stories was far greater.
Crossing generations
In that same essay, Mcmurtry offered a little background on part of his family, describing the path that led William Jefferson Mcmurtry and Louisa Francis Mcmurtry — his paternal grandparents — to Archer County in the 1880s.
“If I repeat the fact of an initial emptiness, and emphasize it throughout this essay,” he wrote, “it is because it is so important to my own effort at self-understanding.”
Mcmurtry spent his entire childhood in the presence of his grandparents. “Consequently,” he wrote, “(I) am one of the few writers who can still claim to have had prolonged and intimate contact with first-generation American pioneers, men and women who came to a nearly absolute emptiness and began filling it of themselves.”
Mcmurtry went on to state that, “One of the things I have been doing … is filling that same emptiness, peopling it, trying to imagine what the word ‘frontier’ meant to my grandparents.”
Mcmurtry was born June 3, 1936, and grew up on a ranch outside Archer City, which would be the basis for Thalia, a town that united a trilogy of novels starting with “Horseman, Pass By” in 1961. By that time, Mcmurtry had passed through the University of North Texas as an undergrad and Rice University, where he earned a master’s. He spent a couple of years in California as a fellow at Stanford before returning to Texas.
He found a state with a strong narrative tradition, though one whose lionized legend — writer J. Frank Dobie — was near the end of his life and career.
Two years after “Horseman, Pass By” was published, Mcmurtry’s story about a ranch owner and his antagonistic stepson became “Hud,” a hit film starring Paul Newman. “Leaving Cheyenne” was published in 1962 and was made into the film “Lovin’ Molly,” and in 1966 he published the third Thalia book, “The Last Picture Show,” which would become a feature film by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971. Mcmurtry during this time lived in Houston, where he wrote, worked as a professor and managed a bookstore.
“Houston was more or less my Paris, or such Paris as I had,” he wrote in a Texas Monthly piece, “and I still think of Rice University as my intellectual home.”
The city would become the setting for six Mcmurtry novels, four of which he published in the ’70s, though at that point he was living far from Houston.
Mcmurtry was living in Los Angeles during the shoot for “The Last Picture Show,” having worked on the film’s screenplay with Bogdanovich. In the early ’70s, he relocated to the Washington, D.C., area, opening Booked Up, a Georgetown-based bookstore that remained open more than 30 years.
Mcmurtry enjoyed further success in Washington. One of his Houston novels, “Terms of Endearment,” found its way to movie theaters. James L. Brooks’ film came out in 1983 — eight years after the book was published — and was a box office hit; it won five Academy Awards.
Houston novelist Chris Cander cited his work as “honest and unflinching and deeply nuanced. He also wrote deeply fleshed-out characters, especially women. I don’t know many male writers that got women so right as he did consistently.”
Go west
In the 1980s, Mcmurtry returned to “Lonesome Dove,” a story he abandoned in the ’70s. He and Bogdanovich had intended to collaborate on a Western film but couldn’t get it to production. Mcmurtry took back the story and developed it himself. His cast of characters was deep, each with richly realized histories, led by Capts. Woodrow Call and Augustus Mccrae, two former Texas Rangers leading a cattle drive to Montana from Lonesome Dove, a little Texas town.
The journey proved fraught. Where William Faulkner put his
“As I Lay Dying” characters through fire and flood, Mcmurtry set his own chilling snares for the ill-fated travelers. The story was a meditation on time and life, and Mcmurtry would later write of it, “I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people.”
Despite his intention of demythologizing an old West codified by pulp novels and Hollywood, Mcmurtry found his book was revered as a new piece of mythology during a period of low ebb for the Western. He disparagingly referred to the book as “a kind of ‘Gone With the Wind’ of the West,” which spoke more about his disappointment in the book’s reception than the book itself.
“Lonesome Dove” was a bestseller, and a 1989 TV miniseries further made it a cultural touchstone.
“The novel is so anti-romantic,” said Davis, the curator at Texas State. “It’s bleak in many ways. But you see the film, there’s something about having these people on horseback in this beautiful scenery that is inherently romantic.”
Despite his reservations about the Western mythology, Mcmurtry would write a “Lonesome Dove” sequel in 1993, “Streets of Laredo,” and two prequels: “Dead Man’s Walk” in 1995 and “Comanche Moon” in 1997.
“Streets of Laredo” bore an even darker tone than “Lonesome Dove,” possibly because of Mcmurtry’s frustration at the way “Dove” was received. But he also suffered a heart attack in 1991, and a prolonged depression followed it. His character Woodrow Call endures a leg injury and amputation in “Streets of Laredo” (a callback to his friend in “Dove”), yielding a devastating piece of writing. “He could remember the person he had been,” Mcmurtry wrote, “but he could not become that person again.”
Prolific post-pulitzer
Mcmurtry remained prolific, though, as the 20th century wound to a close. In addition to the “Lonesome Dove” prequels, he revisited some of the characters from “The Last Picture Show” in “Duane’s Depressed” in 1999. He acknowledged affinity for the book, once telling Texas Monthly that it and “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” “might lift me out of the minor catalogue.”
As ably as Mcmurtry wrote about the harshness of the West, he also was capable of great sensitivity in his work. Even early in his writing, he took care to fully develop stories for the female characters in his books. He also wrote frankly about men suffering from depression, even if the characters didn’t necessarily have the clinical know-how to specify their afflictions.
After Mcmurtry’s heart attack, he changed his approach. He collaborated frequently with writer Ossana, starting with “Pretty Boy Floyd,” a novel about the famed gangster that was published in 1994.
Ossana brought Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” to Mcmurtry, and they wrote a screenplay that earned them a rash of awards including an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best screenplay.
By this time, Mcmurtry had long since returned to Texas, landing where he began, in Archer City. Though the town’s population had long hovered around 1,800, Mcmurtry in the late ’80s opened a bookstore there that peaked with nearly a half-million volumes for sale.
But in 2012, he sold off most of the titles at an auction tagged The Last Book Sale, a reference to one of his best-known works. Like Anarene, Texas, in 1951, when “The Last Picture Show” was set, Archer City had seen its fortunes turn, as oil dried up. The sale itself felt like an occurence from a Mcmurtry novel.
No longer a bookseller, he continued to write, though the pace slowed. Mcmurtry’s last novel was “The Last Kind Words Saloon,” a telling of part of the history of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday — another attempt to demythologize two misrepresented “heroes” of the Old West.
The book’s title bears the echo of “The Last Picture Show.” Mcmurtry’s book titles often hint at the end of something or things caught in fragile transition: “Horseman, Pass By,” “Leaving Cheyenne,” “The Late Child,” “When the Light Goes,” “Moving On,” “All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers,” “Dead Man’s Walk.”
Beyond the frontier
Mcmurtry’s work didn’t always shine. His “Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways,” published in 2000, was as colorless as an interstate trip without taking the time to visit any points along the way.
But more often, he wrote with depth about people in transition. He wrote about the frontier and an existence that began to fade as the 19th century yielded to the 20th. And Mcmurtry also wrote with feeling as the 20th century crawled toward the 21st. He was interested in modes of life — work and existence — as they cycled in and out of being. The frontier ended at the Pacific Ocean, so Mcmurtry addressed what he called “the post-frontier.”
The great through-line in his work went back to his youth, but he saw Texas’ 21st century identity as connected directly.
“Texans spent so long getting past the frontier experience because that experience is so overwhelmingly powerful,” he wrote. He described the hopes and anxieties that might afflict a small immigrant family generations ago.
“Elements of that primal venturing will surely inform several generations,” he wrote.
Nothing about such thinking sounds minor, but rather a deeply probing theme that informed an incredible body of work created over a lifetime that spanned multiple lifetimes.
Mcmurtry is survived by his second wife, Faye Kesey; his son, singer-songwriter James Mcmurtry; and his grandson, singersongwriter Curtis Mcmurtry.