The Texas author who wrote unsentimental tales of the West
Larry McMurtry 1936–2021
Larry McMurtry grew up on the desolate plains of north central Texas, and in both his life and work he never quite left them. In his long career McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels, dozens of screenplays, and 14 nonfiction books covering many topics. But it was his unromantic tales of the American West that brought McMurtry his greatest acclaim. He came to prominence with 1961’s Horseman, Pass By and 1966’s The Last Picture Show, both novels set in rural Texas and turned into lauded movies (the former as Hud, starring Paul Newman). He co-wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain—about the tragic love affair between two gay cowboys, based on a short story by Annie Proulx—for which he won an Oscar in 2006. But to many critics and fans, his finest work was Lonesome Dove, a sprawling book about two retired Texas Rangers who lead a brutal 1870s cattle drive to Montana. It won a Pulitzer in 1986, became a popular miniseries, and sold well over a million copies. Yet to McMurtry, Lonesome Dove was in one sense a failure. “All I had wanted to do was write a novel that demythologized the West,” he said. “Instead, it became the chief source of Western mythology. Some things you cannot explain.”
McMurtry was born “into a family of ranchers” outside Archer City, Texas, said the Associated Press. A so-so horse rider, he realized early that he lacked the manual skills needed for the ranching life. When a cousin went off to fight in World War II and left behind a box of adventure books, “McMurtry found his true vocation,” said the Austin American-Statesman. He attended North Texas State University, got a master’s in English from Rice
University, and completed Horseman, Pass By— about a charismatic, amoral rancher who happily sells sick cattle to his neighbors—while taking a fellowship at Stanford University.
He spent years “as an itinerant English teacher” until freed from academia by the box office success of 1971’s The Last Picture Show, said The Washington Post. The story followed restless teens in the dusty town of Thalia, a fictionalized version of Archer City—where McMurtry returned in 1988 after spending time in Houston, Los Angeles, and Virginia. At home, he’d write five pages every morning on his manual typewriter before breaking for biscuits and gravy at the Dairy Queen. “For many years, McMurtry maintained a parallel career as an antiquarian bookseller,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). He owned shops in Houston and Washington, D.C., before opening the massive Booked Up in Archer City, which he operated until his death. In 1991, McMurtry had a heart attack and quadruple-bypass surgery, then “fell into a long depression,” said The New York Times. He moved in with a woman, Diana Ossana, he’d met at an all-youcan-eat catfish restaurant in Tucson; Ossana became a collaborator, but not a lover. He settled into an “unusual arrangement in the last years of his life,” marrying the widow of former Stanford classmate Ken Kesey; she then moved in with the two of them. In later years, some critics spoke of declining quality, as he recycled favored characters in numerous sequels and prequels. McMurtry had an unsentimental view of his output. “Maybe a couple of books will last,” he said in 2016. “But the rest will end up on back shelves of bookshops. There could be worse fates.”