Larry McMurtry (born June 3, 1936 in Wichita Falls, Texas) is a novelist, screenwriter and essayist.
McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive their cattle from the Rio Grande to a new home in the frontier of Montana. It was adapted into a hit television miniseries. Much of his other fiction is also set in the "old west" or contemporary Texas.
He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia (which is near Archer City). He earned degrees from North Texas State University (B.A. 1958) and Rice University (M.A. 1960). He published his first novels while an English instructor, and he won the 1962 Texas Institute of Letters Jesse M. Jones award. In 1964 he was awarded a Guggenheim grant.
In 1960, McMurtry was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he studied the craft of fiction under novelist Wallace Stegner and alongside a number of other future literary luminaries, including Ken Kesey, Peter S. Beagle, Robert Stone, and Gordon Lish. McMurtry and Kesey maintained a close friendship after McMurtry left California and returned to Texas, and Kesey's famous cross-country trip with his Merry Pranksters in the day-glo painted schoolbus 'Furthur' included a memorable stop at McMurtry's home in Houston, described in Tom Wolfe's New-Journalistic masterpiece The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
A book collector, McMurtry purchased a rare book store in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood in 1970 and named it Booked Up. He moved to Washington D.C. to run the store. In 1988 he opened a second Booked Up in Archer City, establishing the town as an American "Book City." The Archer City store is arguably the largest single used bookstore in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000 titles. Citing economic pressures from chain bookstores, McMurtry came close to shuttering the Archer City store in 2005, but chose to keep it open after an outpouring of public support.
One of McMurtry's bookstores in Archer City, Texas
One of McMurtry's bookstores in Archer City, Texas
A prolific, award-winning, and highly-respected literary writer, McMurtry is well-known for the film adaptations of his work, especially Hud (from the novel Horseman, Pass By), starring Paul Newman and Patricia Neal; Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece, The Last Picture Show; James L. Brooks's Terms of Endearment, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture (1984); and Lonesome Dove, which became an enormously popular television mini-series starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.
In 2006, he was co-winner (with Diana Ossana) of both the Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. He accepted his Oscar wearing jeans and cowboy boots along with his dinner jacket—which Academy Awards host Jon Stewart made fun of immediately—and paid homage to his love for books by telling everybody that Brokeback Mountain was a "book before it was a movie." In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, he famously paid tribute to his Swiss-made Hermes 3000 typewriter.
His son, James McMurtry, is a singer/songwriter and guitarist.
Books, novels and films
* 1961 - Horseman, Pass By - adapted for film as Hud
* 1963 - Leaving Cheyenne - adapted for film as Lovin' Molly
* 1966 - The Last Picture Show - adapted into a film of the same name
* 1968 - In A Narrow Grave
* 1970 - Moving On
* 1972 - All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers
* 1974 - It's Always We Rambled (essay)
* 1975 - Terms of Endearment - adapted into a film of the same name
* 1978 - Somebody's Darling
* 1982 - Cadillac Jack
* 1983 - Desert Rose
* 1985 - Lonesome Dove, 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner, and first of what became a series
* 1987 - Texasville - adapted into a film of the same name - A continuation of the story begun in The Last Picture Show
* 1987 - Film Flam
* 1988 - Anything For Billy
* 1988 - The Murder of Mary Phagan - TV story
* 1989 - Some Can Whistle
* 1990 - Buffalo Girls - adapted into a TV movie
* 1990 - Montana - TV movie
* 1992 - The Evening Star - adapted for film as The Evening Star - A continuation of the story begun in Terms of Endearment
* 1992 - Memphis - TV movie
* 1992 - Falling from Grace - TV movie
* 1993 - Streets of Laredo, another in the Lonesome Dove series
* 1994 - Pretty Boy Floyd (with Diana Ossana)
* 1995 - Dead Man's Walk, another in the Lonesome Dove series
* 1995 - The Late Child
* 1997 - Comanche Moon, the last as of 2007 of the Lonesome Dove series
* 1997 - Zeke and Ned
* 1999 - Crazy Horse
* 1999 - Duane's Depressed - A continuation of The Last Picture Show and Texasville story
* 1999 - Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen
* 2000 - Roads: Driving America's Great Highways
* 2000 - Boone's Lick
* 2001 - Sacagawea's Nickname (essays on the American West)
* 2002 - Sin Killer - The Berrybender Narratives, Book 1
* 2002 - Johnson County War - TV mini-series
* 2003 - The Wandering Hill - The Berrybender Narratives, Book 2
* 2003 - By Sorrow's River - The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3
* 2004 - Folly and Glory: A Novel - The Berrybender Narratives, Book 4
* 2005 - Brokeback Mountain - Oscar-winning screenplay (adapted from the short story by E. Annie Proulx)
* 2005 - The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley & the Beginnings of Superstardom in America (May)
* 2005 - Oh What A Slaughter! (Nov)
* 2005 - Loop Group (Dec)
* 2006 - Telegraph Days (May)
* 2007 - When The Light Goes (Feb) - A continuation of The Last Picture Show, Texasville, and Duane's Depressed story
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