Larry McMurtry

During the 1960–1961 academic year, McMurtry was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he studied the craft of fiction under Frank O'Connor and Malcolm Cowley,[8] alongside other aspiring writers, including Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Peter S. Beagle, and Gurney Norman. Wallace Stegner was on sabbatical in Europe during McMurtry's fellowship year.[9]

McMurtry and Kesey remained friends after McMurtry left California and returned to Texas to take a year-long composition instructorship at Texas Christian University.[10] In 1963, he returned to Rice University, where he served as a lecturer in English until 1969.[11] He entertained some of his early students with accounts of Hollywood and the filming of Hud, for which he was consulting. In 1964, Kesey and his Merry Pranksters conducted their noted cross-country trip, stopping at McMurtry's home in Houston. The adventure in the day-glo-painted school bus Furthur was chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. That same year, McMurtry was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[12]

McMurtry won numerous awards from the Texas Institute of Letters: three times the Jesse H. Jones Award—in 1962, for Horseman, Pass By; in 1967, for The Last Picture Show, which he shared with Tom Pendleton's The Iron Orchard; and in 1986, for Lonesome Dove. He won the Amon G. Carter award for periodical prose in 1966 for Texas: Good Times Gone or Here Again?[13] and the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1984.[14] In 1986, McMurtry received the annual Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award from the Tulsa Library Trust.[15] He reflected on his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove, in Literary Life: A Second Memoir (2009), writing that it was the "Gone With the Wind of the West … a pretty good book; it's not a towering masterpiece."[16]

McMurtry described his method for writing novels in Books: A Memoir. He said that from his first novel on, he would get up early and dash off five pages of narrative. When he published the memoir in 2008, he said this was still his method, although by then, he wrote 10 pages a day. He also wrote every day, ignoring holidays and weekends.[17] McMurtry was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.[18]

McMurtry was a vigorous defender of free speech and, while serving as president of PEN American Center (now PEN America) from 1989 to 1991, led the organization's efforts to support writer Salman Rushdie,[19] whose novel The Satanic Verses (1988) caused a major controversy among some Muslims, with the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issuing a fatwā calling for Rushdie's assassination, after which attempts were made on his life.[20]

In 1989, McMurtry testified on behalf of PEN America before the U.S. Congress in opposition to immigration rules in the 1952 McCarran–Walter Act that for decades permitted the visa denial and deportation of foreign writers for ideological reasons.[16] He recounted how before PEN America was to host the 1986 International PEN Congress, "there was a serious question as to whether such a meeting could in fact take place in this country... the McCarran–Walter Act could have effectively prevented such a gathering in the United States." He denounced the relevant rules as "an affront to all who cherish the constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression and association. To a writer whose living depends upon the uninhibited interchange of ideas and experiences, these provisions are especially appalling." Subsequently, some provisions that excluded certain classes of immigrants based on their political beliefs were revoked by the Immigration Act of 1990.[21]

While at Stanford, McMurtry became a rare-book scout.[22] During his years in Houston, he managed a book store called the Bookman. In 1969, he moved to the Washington, D.C., area. In 1970 with two partners, he started a bookshop in Georgetown, which he named Booked Up. In 1988, he opened another Booked Up in Archer City. It became one of the largest antiquarian bookstores in the United States, carrying between 400,000 and 450,000 titles. Citing economic pressures from Internet bookselling, McMurtry came close to shutting down the Archer City store in 2005, but chose to keep it open after great public support.

In early 2012, McMurtry decided to downsize and sell off the greater portion of his inventory. He felt the collection was a liability for his heirs.[23] The auction was conducted on August 10 and 11, 2012, and was overseen by Addison and Sarova Auctioneers of Macon, Georgia. This epic book auction sold books by the shelf, and was billed as "The Last Booksale", in keeping with the title of McMurtry's The Last Picture Show. Dealers, collectors, and gawkers came out en masse from all over the country to witness this historic auction. As stated by McMurtry on the weekend of the sale, "I've never seen that many people lined up in Archer City, and I'm sure I never will again."[24]

One of McMurtry's bookstores in Archer City, Texas

One of the aisles of books at Booked Up in Archer City

Bookstore cat, Booked Up (2008)

McMurtry became well known for the film adaptations of his work, which were seen by many viewers, especially Hud (from the novel Horseman, Pass By), starring Paul Newman and Patricia Neal;[25] the Peter Bogdanovich–directed The Last Picture Show;[26] James L. Brooks's Terms of Endearment, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture (1984);[27] and Lonesome Dove, which became a popular television miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.[28][29]

In 2006, he was co-winner (with Diana Ossana) of both the Best Screenplay Golden Globe[30] and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, adapted from a short story by E. Annie Proulx. He accepted his Oscar while wearing a dinner jacket over jeans and cowboy boots.[31] In his speech, he promoted books, reminding the audience the movie was developed from a short story. In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, he paid tribute to his Swiss-made Hermes 3000 typewriter.[32]

• 1982: Cadillac Jack[40]
• 1988: Anything For Billy (fictionalized biography of Billy the Kid)[41]
• 1990: Buffalo Girls (fictionalized biography of Calamity Jane)[42] – adapted for TV as Buffalo Girls[43]
• 1994: Pretty Boy Floyd (with Diana Ossana) (fictionalised biography of the titular gangster)[44]
• 1997: Zeke and Ned (with Diana Ossana) (fictionalized biography of the last Cherokee warriors)[45]
• 2000: Boone's Lick[46]
• 2005: Loop Group[47]
• 2006: Telegraph Days[48]
• 2014: The Last Kind Words Saloon[49]

Larry McMurtry's first three novels, all set in the north Texas town of Thalia after World War II

• 1961: Horseman, Pass By[50] – adapted for film as Hud[25]
• 1963: Leaving Cheyenne – adapted for film as Lovin' Molly[51]
• 1966: The Last Picture Show – adapted for film as The Last Picture Show[52]

The books follow the story of mother/daughter characters Harmony and Pepper

• 1983: The Desert Rose[53]
• 1995: The Late Child[54]

The books follow the story of character Duane Moore

• 1966: The Last Picture Show – adapted for film as The Last Picture Show[52]
• 1987: Texasville – adapted for film as Texasville[55]
• 1999: Duane's Depressed[56]
• 2007: When The Light Goes[57]
• 2009: Rhino Ranch: A Novel[58]

The books follow the stories of occasionally recurring characters living in the Houston, Texas, area

• 1970: Moving On (characters Patsy Carpenter/Danny Deck/Emma Horton/Joe Percy)[59]
• 1972: All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers (Danny Deck/Jill Peel/Emma Horton)[59]
• 1975: Terms of Endearment (Emma Horton/Aurora Greenaway) – adapted for film as Terms of Endearment[59]
• 1978: Somebody's Darling (Jill Peel/Joe Percy)[60]
• 1989: Some Can Whistle (Danny Deck)[59]
• 1992: The Evening Star (Aurora Greenaway)[61] – adapted for film as The Evening Star[62]

The Contrabando, a ghost town and movie set within Big Bend Ranch State Park, used for making the "Dead Man's Walk" and "Streets of Laredo" parts of the Lonesome Dove miniseries.

• 1985: Lonesome Dove, 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner[59]
• 1993: Streets of Laredo[63]
• 1995: Dead Man's Walk[64]
• 1997: Comanche Moon[65]

• 2002: Sin Killer[66]
• 2003: The Wandering Hill[66]
• 2003: By Sorrow's River[66]
• 2004: Folly and Glory[66]

• 1999: Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories[67]

• 1988: The Murder of Mary Phagan – TV movie[68]
• 1990: Montana – TV movie[69]
• 1992: Memphis – TV movie[69]
• 1992: Falling from Grace[69] – film starring John Mellencamp[70]
• 2002: Johnson County War – TV miniseries[69]
• 2005: Brokeback Mountain (with Diana Ossana) – Oscar-winning screenplay (adapted from the short story by E. Annie Proulx)[69]
• 2020: Joe Bell (with Diana Ossana)[71]