Lonesome Dove author and Brokeback Mountain screenwriter Larry McMurtry dies at 84
Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer prize-winning author and screenwriter who examined the reality of the American west in novels including Lonesome Dove, has died.
McMurtry, 84, was the author of more than 30 novels, from Terms of Endearment to The Last Picture Show, and received an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for his work on Brokeback Mountain with Diana Ossana, an award he famously accepted wearing jeans and cowboy boots. His death was confirmed to the New York Times by a spokesperson for his family.
McMurtry, who was born in Texas, published his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, in 1961. Set in a north Texas town on a cattle ranch, it was filmed as Hud, with Paul Newman in the leading role. His third novel, The Last Picture Show, a coming-of-age story set in a small Texas town, was adapted into a 1971 film starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd, and brought him to wider fame.
The film adaptation of his novel Terms of Endearment, the story of a widowed mother and her daughter starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson, won the Oscar for best picture, while his 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, following retired Texas rangers driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana in the 1870s, won him a Pulitzer prize and was adapted into a mini-series starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones.
“I wrote the book and saw it become acclaimed, more so – indeed much more so – than any of my other 28 fictions,” McMurtry wrote of Lonesome Dove in his memoir, Literary Life. But he described the novel as “the Gone With the Wind of the West … a pretty good book; it’s not a towering masterpiece”.
Barack Obama, when presenting McMurtry with a National Humanities Medal in 2015, said: “He wrote about the Texas he knew from his own life, and then the old west as he heard it through the stories of his grandfather’s – on his grandfather’s porch. And in Lonesome Dove, the story of two ex-Texas Rangers in the 19th century, readers found out something essential about their own souls, even if they’d never been out west or been on a ranch.”
McMurtry told NPR in 2014 that he did not buy into the myth of cowboy as hero. “To me it was hollow, and I think it was hollow for my father, though he would not have ever brought that to his conscious mind. He totally loved cowboys, and so did most of the cowboys he worked with, and that got him through his life. But he knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t last another generation.”
McMurtry was also an antiquarian bookseller, writing in Literary Life that
his collection, which spanned more than 30,000 volumes, was “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves”. Accepting his Oscar in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain, he took the opportunity to thank booksellers and said: “Remember that Brokeback Mountain was a book before it was a movie,” he said. “From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world, all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book, a wonderful culture which we mustn’t lose.”
As PEN America president from 1989 to 1991, McMurtry was a staunch defender of free speech, testifying before Congress on behalf of PEN in order to oppose provisions of federal immigration laws that allowed the US to exclude writers and others on ideological grounds. “In addition to his epic portrayals and subversions of the American west, McMurtry was through and through a vigorous defender of the freedom to write,” said PEN America President Ayad Akhtar. “We’ve lost a giant of American literature, and a giant in the history of PEN America.”
James L Brooks, who directed the adaptation of Terms of Endearment, called McMurtry “among the best writers ever” on Twitter. “I remember when he sent me on my way to adapt Terms – his refusal to let me hold him in awe. And the fact that he was personally working the cash register of his rare book store as he did so.”
“McMurtry is truly one of giants of American literature, in the very rich tradition of Western storytelling,” said his publisher in the UK, Jeremy Trevathan
at Macmillan. “He was a real ‘book person’ too and spent his life not only as a prize-winning novelist and critic, but also as a bookseller and rarebook scout. He was a gentleman and a modern ‘man of letters’, which is a rare thing these days.”