Larry
McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies at 84
In “Lonesome Dove,”
“The Last Picture Show” and dozens more novels and screenplays, he offered
unromantic depictions of a long mythologized region.
New York Times
By Dwight Garner
March 26, 2021
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 on Thursday. He was 84.
The death was
confirmed by Amanda Lundberg, a spokeswoman for the family. She did not specify
a cause or say where he died.
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 his longtime collaborator Diana 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 mini-series.
Mr. 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.
“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, the 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.
Mr. 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.
Mr. McMurtry relished his role as a literary outsider. He
lived for much of his life in his hometown, Archer City, Texas, 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 bluejeans
and cowboy boots below his dinner jacket. He reminded audiences that the
screenplay was an adaptation of a short story 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
Review of Books, where he often wrote on topics relating to the American West.
His friends included the writer Susan Sontag,
whom he once took to a stock car race.
Six Buildings, One
Bookstore
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. About leaving the business to his heirs, he said:
“One store is manageable. Four stores would be a burden.”
Mr. McMurtry’s
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 Mr. McMurtry called a “bookless ranch house”
outside of Archer City, and later in the town itself. Archer City would become
the model for Thalia, a town that often appeared in his fiction.
He became a serious reader early, and discovered that the
ranching life was not for him. “While I was passable on a horse,” he wrote in “Books,” his 2008 memoir, “I entirely
lacked manual skills.”
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 an M.A. in English from Rice University
in 1960, Mr. McMurtry went west, to Stanford University, where he was a Stegner
Fellow in a class that included the future novelist Ken Kesey.
Thanks to his friendship with Mr. Kesey, Mr. McMurtry
made a memorable cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s
classic of new journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). The book
details Mr. Kesey’s drug-fueled journey across America, along with a gang of
friends collectively known as the Merry Pranksters, in a painted school bus.
In the scene, Mr. Kesey’s bus, driven by Neal Cassady,
pulls up to Mr. McMurtry’s suburban Houston house, and a naked and wigged-out
woman hops out and snatches his son. Mr. Wolfe describes Mr. McMurtry “reaching
tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, ‘Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a
minute, ma’am!’”
Mr. McMurtry wrote
his first novels while teaching English at Texas Christian University, Rice
University, George Mason College and American University. He was not fond of
teaching, however, and left it behind as his career went forward.
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 a 1976 profile of Mr. McMurtry in The New Yorker, Calvin
Trillin observed his book-buying skills. “Larry knows which shade of blue cover
on a copy of ‘Native Son’ indicates a first printing and which one doesn’t,”
Mr. Trillin wrote. “He knows the precise value of poetry books by Robert Lowell
that Robert Lowell may now have forgotten writing.”
A Knack for Female
Characters
While much of Mr.
McMurtry’s writing dealt with the West or his Texas heritage, he also wrote
novels about Washington (“Cadillac Jack”),
Hollywood (“Somebody’s
Darling”) and Las Vegas (“The Desert
Rose”). There was a comic brio in his best books, alongside an
ever-present melancholy. He was praised for his ability to create memorable and
credible female characters, including the self-centered widow Aurora Greenway
in “Terms of
Endearment,” played by Shirley MacLaine in the film version.
In the novel, Aurora
is up front about her appetites. “Only a saint could live with me, and I can’t
live with a saint,” she says. “Older men aren’t up to me, and younger men
aren’t interested.”
“I believe the one
gift that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to make up characters
that readers connect with,” Mr. McMurtry once wrote. “My characters move them,
which is also why those same characters move them when they meet them on the
screen.”
His early novels were
generally well reviewed, although Thomas Lask, writing about “The Last Picture
Show” in The Times
Book Review, said, “Mr. McMurtry is not exactly a virtuoso at the
typewriter.” Other critics would pick up that complaint. Mr. McMurtry wrote too
much, some said, and quantity outstripped quality. “I dash off 10 pages a day,”
Mr. McMurtry boasted in “Books.”
Some felt that Mr. McMurtry clouded the memories of some
of his best books, including “The Last Picture Show,” “Lonesome Dove” and
“Terms of Endearment,” by writing sequels to them, sequels that sometimes
turned into tetralogies or even quintets. It was hard to recall, while reading
his “Berrybender Narratives,” a frontier soap opera that ran to four books, the
writer who delivered “Lonesome Dove.”
Mr. McMurtry sometimes felt the sting of critical
neglect. “Should I be bitter about the literary establishment’s long
disinterest in me?” he wrote in “Literary Life,” a 2009 memoir. “I shouldn’t,
and mostly I’m not, though I do admit to the occasional moment of irritation.”
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, he liked to tweak his critics by wearing a
T-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist.”
He was open about the shadows that sometimes fell over
his life and writing.
After completing “Terms of Endearment,” he entered what
he described as “a literary gloom that lasted from 1975 until 1983,” a period
when he came to dislike his own prose. He had a heart attack in 1991, followed
by quadruple-bypass surgery. In the wake of that surgery he fell into a long
depression during which, he told a reporter, he did little more than lie on a
couch for more than a year.
That couch belonged to Ms. Ossana, whom Mr. McMurtry had
met in the 1980s at an all-you-can-eat catfish restaurant in Tucson. They began
living together, and collaborating shortly afterward — Mr. McMurtry writing on
a typewriter, Ms. Ossana entering the work into a computer, often editing and
rearranging.
“When I first met Larry, he was involved with about five
or six different women,” Ms. Ossana told Grantland.com in 2014. “He was quite the ladies’ man. I was
always really puzzled. One day I said to him, ‘So all of these women are your
girlfriends?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, do they know about one
another?’ He said, ‘Nooo.’”
Mr. McMurtry had reportedly completed a draft of a memoir
titled “62 Women,” about some of the women he knew and admired. He had an
unusual arrangement in the last years of his life.
n 2011 he married Faye Kesey, 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.”
There was no information immediately on his survivors.
Mr. McMurtry’s many books included three memoirs and
three collections of essays, including “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,”
published in 1999. “There are days,” Mr. McMurtry wrote, “where I think my own
nonfiction will outlive my novels.”
In addition to old books, Mr. McMurtry prized antiquated
methods of composition. He wrote all of his work on a typewriter, and did not
own a computer. He wrote for the same editor, Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster,
for more than three decades before moving to Liveright, an imprint of W.W.
Norton, in 2014.
“Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains
just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality,” he once
said, “I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds.”
McMURTRY, Larry (Larry Jeff McMurtry)
Born: 6/3/1936, Archer City, Texas, U.S.A.
Died: 3/25/2021, Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A.
Larry
McMurtry’s westerns – producer, writer:
Hud – 1963 [writer]
Lovin’ Molly – 1974 [based on novel Leaving Cheyenne]
Lonesome Dove – 1989 [writer]
Montana – 1990 [writer]
The Evening Star – 1992 [author]
Lonesome Dove: The Series – 1994 [writer]
Buffalo Girls – 1995 [writer]
Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years – 1995-1996 [writer]
Streets of Laredo – 1995 [executive producer,
screenwriter]
Dead Man’s Walk – 1996 [executive producer, writer]
Boone's Lick – 2000 [author]
Johnson County War – 2002 [producer, screenwriter]
Sin Killer – 2002 [author]
Sorrows River – 2003 [author]
Brokeback Mountain – 2005 [executive producer, writer]
Comanche Moon – 2008 [producer, writer]
Telegraph Days – 2006 [author]
The Color of Lightening – 2010 [author]
The Kind Words Saloon – 2014 [author]
