Myth-piercing novelist of tales from American West
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 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, 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 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. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television miniseries.
McMurtry wrote “Lonesome Dove” as an anti-Western, a rebuke of sorts to the romantic notions of dime-store novels and an exorcism of the false ghosts in the work of writers like Louis L’Amour.
McMurtry was the son of a rancher, and the realism in his books extended to the Texas he knew as a young man. From the start of his career, McMurtry’s books were attractive to filmmakers. “Horseman, Pass By” was made into “Hud,” directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman. McMurtry’s funny, elegiac and sexually frank coming-of-age novel “The Last Picture Show” (1966) was made into a film of the same title in 1971 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.
Larry Jeff McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, on June 3, 1936, to Hazel Ruth and William Jefferson McMurtry. 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.
After receiving a Master of Arts in English from Rice University in 1960, McMurtry went west, to Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in a class that included future novelist Ken Kesey.
McMurtry wrote his first novels while teaching English at Texas Christian University, Rice University, George Mason College and American University. He moved to the Washington area and with a partner opened his first Booked Up store in 1971, dealing in rare books. He opened the much larger Booked Up, in Archer City, in 1988 and owned and operated it until his death.
In 2011, he married Norma Faye Kesey, Ken Kesey’s widow.