Gordon Lucy: Pulitzer Prize, classic novels, author Larry McMurtry is in the US pantheon of writers
Larry McMurtry was a figure of immense significance in 20th-century American culture. As the author of 29 novels, more than 30 screenplays, three memoirs and two collections of essays, he was a compulsive writer.
Tracey Daugherty, his biographer, quoted the critic Dave Hickey: ‘Larry is a writer, and it's kind of like being a critter. If you leave a cow alone, he'll eat grass. If you leave Larry alone, he'll write books. When he's in public, he may say hello and goodbye, but otherwise he is just resting, getting ready to go write.’
In a memoir published in 2008 he described his method for writing. Writing his first novel, he would rise early and produce five pages of narrative. In 2008 that was still his method, except he wrote 10 pages a day. He wrote every day, ignoring holidays and weekends. If he missed a day, he developed a headache.
Fellow author and screenwriter Andy Greenwald believed McMurtry was ‘arguably the greatest American novelist of the 20th century’. This was an accolade for which the competition would be a very crowded field.
Of Scotch-Irish (or Ulster-Scot) descent, Larry McMurtry was born on June 3 1936 on a cattle ranch outside of Archer City, Texas.
Suffering badly from bronchial and breathing difficulties and allergies, Larry was never cowboy material but he was surrounded by rich material from which he could draw lavishly in his writing.
Larry’s first library was a set of 19 boys' adventure books given to him by Robert Hilburn, a cousin setting off for war in 1942. McMurtry eagerly devoured them. This gift, he once wrote, ‘changed my life’.
His novels included ‘Horseman, Pass By’ (1962), ‘The Last Picture Show’ (1966), ‘Terms of Endearment’ (1975) and ‘Lonesome Dove’ (1985). Films adapted from McMurtry’s work earned 34 Oscar nominations and won 13 Oscars.
‘Horseman, Pass By’ was set in a north Texas town on a cattle ranch and 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 even wider fame. (Shepherd had a relationship with McMurtry and described him as ‘the love of her life’.)
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.
McMurtry’s magnificent ‘Lonesome Dove’ (1985) is Nick Hornby’s favourite novel. (The novel takes its title from a small, dusty Texas border town of Lonesome Dove along the Rio Grande.)
Following Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, a pair of short-tempered retired Texas Rangers driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana in the 1870s, it won McMurtry a Pulitzer Prize.
Hornby describes it as ‘800 pages of cowboys, cattle, guns, landscape, whores, rivers and snakes. It’s violent only because life was violent – there is no contrivance, nor is there any revelling in the blood: things are as they are. It’s exciting in a way that much literary fiction isn’t. It’s also as ambitious, as generous and as densely populated as anything by Charles Dickens, and it’s funny’.
McMurtry’s personal assessment of ‘Lonesome Dove’ was that it was the ‘“Gone with the Wind” of the West… a pretty good book; it’s not a towering masterpiece.’
The American journalist Bart Schaneman, whose family heritage enables him to identify closely with the novel, has tentatively compared the book to ‘War and Peace’: ‘The book is a great adventure, with an extensive cast of characters, almost on the scale of an epic Russian classic, but with cowboys. It depicts an important period in our history, one made more important because so much has been said about this brief span of time in America’s formative years.’
In 2025 Schaneman amusingly suggested that it is ‘The Lord of the Rings’ for cowboys, or at least ‘The Hobbit’.
Although an admirer of Hemingway, Schaneman doubted if Hemingway wrote any books that were more exciting and pleasurable to read than ‘Lonesome Dove’.
A greater believer in the centrality of the book to culture, with the revenue from movie rights and writing screenplays, McMurtry built up a reputation as America’s leading book scout and bibliophile, owning antiquarian and second-hand bookstores.
Living and teaching near Washington DC, McMurtry founded Booked Up in Georgetown. As famous bookstores closed their doors in Washington and elsewhere in the 1970s, he and his partner, Marcia Carter, bought up their stocks and filled their own store. They also bought from their wealthy and well-read neighbours in Georgetown and Dupont Circle. For example, much of the library of Alice Roosevelt Longworth (the writer, socialite and eldest child of President Theodore Roosevelt) came their way one cold February day.
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’, adapted from a short story about two gay cowboys by Annie Proulx. He accepted his Oscar wearing a dinner jacket over jeans and cowboy boots. In his acceptance speech he pointedly reminded his audience that ‘Brokeback Mountain’ was a book before it was a film and went on to say: ‘I am going to thank all the booksellers of the world, from the humblest paperback exchange to the greatest bookshops in the world – all are contributors to the culture of the book.’
President Barack Obama presented McMurtry with a National Humanities Medal in 2015. The citation stated that ‘Mr McMurtry's work evokes the character and drama of the American West with stories that examine quintessentially American lives.’
President Obama observed that McMurtry ‘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.’
McMurtry never romanticised the cowboy and the west but he gave pleasure to millions of readers and established the Western as a serious contemporary genre through his take on the history of Texas. Many people who would never dream of reading a Western have been engrossed by ‘Lonesome Dove’.
Larry McMurtry died of heart failure on March 25 2021 at his home in Archer City. He was 84.