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 at home in
Archer City, Texas. He was 84.
اضافة اعلان
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Diana Ossana, his
friend and writing partner.
Over more than five decades, 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 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 miniseries.
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.”
McMurtry himself ultimately likened it, in terms of its sweep, to a Western “Gone
With the Wind.”
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, 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 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, McMurtry’s books were attractive
to filmmakers. “Horseman, Pass By” was made into “Hud,” directed by Martin Ritt
and starring Paul Newman. McMurtry’s funny and elegiac 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.
McMurtry relished his role as a literary outsider. He lived for
much of his life in his hometown, Archer City, 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 Proulx.
Yet McMurtry was a plugged-in man of American letters. For two
years in the early 1990s he was American president of Poets, Playwright, Editors,
Essayists, and Novelists international (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 writer Susan Sontag, whom he once took to a stock car race.
Six Buildings, One Bookstore
For some 50 years, 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, 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.”
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 Larry 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 a Master of Arts in English from Rice University
in 1960, McMurtry went west, to Stanford University, where he was a Stegner
Fellow in a class that included future novelist Ken Kesey.
Thanks to his friendship with Kesey, McMurtry made a memorable
cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s classic of new journalism, “The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). The book details 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, Kesey’s bus, driven by Neal Cassady, pulls up to
McMurtry’s suburban Houston house, and a wigged-out woman hops out and snatches
his son. Wolfe describes McMurtry “reaching tentatively toward her shoulder and
saying, ‘Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am!’”
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 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,” Trillin
wrote. “He knows the precise value of poetry books by Robert Lowell that Robert
Lowell may now have forgotten writing.”
McMurtry’s 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. McMurtry wrote too much, some said, and quantity
outstripped quality. “I dash off 10 pages a day,” McMurtry boasted in “Books.”
Some felt that 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.”
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 Ossana, whom McMurtry had met in the
1980s at an all-you-can-eat catfish restaurant in Tucson, Arizona. They began
living together and collaborating shortly afterward — McMurtry writing on a
typewriter, Ossana entering the work into a computer, often editing and
rearranging.
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.
In 2011, he married Norma Faye Kesey, Ken Kesey’s widow, and she
moved in with McMurtry and 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.”
In addition to his wife and son, McMurtry is survived by two
sisters, Sue Deen and Judy McLemore; a brother, Charlie; and a grandson.
