A short life of the author
Larry McMurtry was the great novelist of Texas and the most important writer to engage with the mythology and reality of the American West since the genre’s nineteenth-century origins — a writer who loved the Western and simultaneously deconstructed it, who understood that the cowboy myth was both a lie and a truth, and whose masterpiece, Lonesome Dove, is one of those rare novels that is simultaneously a popular entertainment read by millions and a work of genuine literary art.
Archer City
Larry Jeff McMurtry was born on 3 June 1936 in Wichita Falls, Texas, and raised on a cattle ranch near Archer City — a small, declining town that became the model for the fictional Thalia in many of his novels. His family had ranched in north-central Texas for generations, and McMurtry grew up in a world of cowboys, cattle, and open grassland that was already vanishing. He later wrote that the transition from the rural, ranch-based Texas of his childhood to the suburban, oil-and-strip-mall Texas of his adulthood was the central subject of his fiction.
He studied English at Rice University and then at Stanford, where he was a Stegner Fellow alongside Ken Kesey. The Stegner Fellowship introduced him to the serious literary world, and he returned to Texas determined to write about his home with the ambition and complexity that Faulkner had brought to Mississippi.
The Texas Novels
Horseman, Pass By (1961), his debut novel, is the story of a young Texan caught between his grandfather (the old, honest rancher) and his stepuncle (the modern, corrupt opportunist). It was adapted as the film Hud (1963, starring Paul Newman), which won three Academy Awards. Leaving Cheyenne (1963) chronicles a love triangle across forty years of Texas life.
The Last Picture Show (1966) is the novel that made McMurtry’s reputation — a devastating portrait of Thalia (Archer City), a dying small town where the closing of the movie theatre signals the end of an era. Peter Bogdanovich’s film adaptation (1971) is one of the great American films, shot in black and white on location in Archer City. Texasville (1987) revisited the characters thirty years later, during the oil bust.
Terms of Endearment (1975), set in Houston, follows the relationship between a mother and daughter with a comic warmth unusual for McMurtry. James L. Brooks’s film adaptation (1983) won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Lonesome Dove
Lonesome Dove (1985) is McMurtry’s masterwork and one of the great American novels. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, two retired Texas Rangers running a failing ranch in the border town of Lonesome Dove, decide to steal a herd of cattle from Mexico and drive them north to Montana to establish the first ranch in the territory. The journey — 2,500 miles across the plains, rivers, and deserts of the American West — is the occasion for a narrative that encompasses love, death, friendship, violence, loyalty, and the meaning of the frontier.
The novel’s power lies in its characters. Gus McCrae — loquacious, literate, life-loving, and fatally charming — and Woodrow Call — taciturn, duty-bound, emotionally paralysed — are among the great partnerships in American fiction, and their relationship is the emotional centre of the book. The supporting cast — Lorena Wood, Blue Duck, July Johnson, Clara Allen — are equally vivid.
Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted as a CBS miniseries (1989, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones) that became one of the highest-rated television events in American history. Three companion novels followed: Dead Man’s Walk (1995), Comanche Moon (1997), and Streets of Laredo (1993).
Bookseller
McMurtry was also a legendary antiquarian bookseller. In the 1980s, he began acquiring entire bookshops and consolidating their stock in Archer City, eventually operating Booked Up — at its peak, four buildings housing over 400,000 volumes. The sight of the dying Texas town kept alive by a vast bookshop was one of the great literary ironies. In 2012, he auctioned off approximately 300,000 volumes in a sale that attracted book dealers from around the world.
His memoir Books: A Memoir (2008) is an account of his life in the book trade — a love letter to the physical book and the culture of reading.
Brokeback Mountain
McMurtry co-wrote the screenplay for Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005, with Diana Ossana), adapting Annie Proulx’s short story about two Wyoming cowboys in a secret love affair. The screenplay won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe.
Collecting McMurtry
Horseman, Pass By (Harper, 1961) in first edition with dust jacket is the key early title — McMurtry’s debut, published before his fame. The Last Picture Show (Dial, 1966) is also collected. Lonesome Dove (Simon & Schuster, 1985), the Pulitzer winner, in first edition brings $200–$800. McMurtry signed prolifically at his Archer City bookshop, and signed copies are moderately available.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anything for Billy McMurtry's reimagining of Billy the Kid — not as a romantic outlaw but as a reckless, semi-literate boy with a gun, seen through the eyes of a dime novelist from Philadelphia who rides west and discovers that the real West bears no resemblance to the fiction he has been writing about it. | 1988 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| Books: A Memoir McMurtry's memoir about his life as a book collector and antiquarian bookseller — a love letter to physical books, to the culture of book scouting and dealing, and to the vanishing world of independent bookshops that McMurtry tried to preserve by buying an entire town's worth of them. | 2008 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| Comanche Moon The second prequel to Lonesome Dove, bridging the gap between Dead Man's Walk and the original novel — Gus and Call are experienced Rangers in the 1850s and 1860s, fighting the last Comanche campaigns and watching the frontier close around them, while their personal lives take the shapes that will define them in old age. | 1997 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| Dead Man's Walk The earliest chronological novel in the Lonesome Dove saga — young Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call join the Texas Rangers in the 1840s and march into the desert on an ill-fated expedition to conquer Santa Fe, learning that the West is larger, more dangerous, and more indifferent than any of them imagined. | 1995 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| Horseman, Pass By Larry McMurtry's debut novel, a spare and devastating portrait of a dying Texas ranch culture told through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old boy watching his grandfather's world collapse — adapted by Martin Ritt as the Paul Newman film Hud, which stripped the novel's complexity down to a star vehicle. | 1961 | Harper & Brothers | English |
| Lonesome Dove McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the 1870s — a novel that simultaneously celebrates and demolishes the Western myth through two aging ex-Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, whose last great adventure becomes an elegy for a frontier that was already vanishing when they were young. | 1985 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| Some Can Whistle A wealthy, reclusive television writer in rural Texas is contacted by the daughter he abandoned decades ago — a fierce, profane young woman from the Houston underclass whose arrival shatters his comfortable isolation and forces him to confront the cost of the choices he made. | 1989 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| Streets of Laredo The sequel to Lonesome Dove — Captain Call, old and alone, is hired to hunt down a young Mexican bandit and train robber, only to find that the West he mastered has changed beyond recognition, that age has stolen his competence, and that the violence he lived by has consequences he never imagined. | 1993 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| Telegraph Days A picaresque novel narrated by Nellie Courtright, a sharpshooter and telegraph operator who drifts through the dying Wild West encountering every famous gunfighter and outlaw of the 1870s and 1880s — McMurtry's late, playful riff on the absurdity of Western mythology. | 2006 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| Terms of Endearment McMurtry's Houston novel — a sprawling, funny, deeply moving story of Aurora Greenway, a formidable widow navigating love and loss in suburban Texas, and her daughter Emma, whose ordinary marriage and extraordinary death form the emotional center of a book that defies the myth of the West by turning its attention to women, suburbs, and the comedy of domestic life. | 1975 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| The Evening Star The sequel to Terms of Endearment — Aurora Greenway in her seventies, still imperious and managing, now raising Emma's three children while navigating old age, diminished suitors, and the discovery that grandchildren are harder to control than daughters. | 1992 | Simon & Schuster | English |
| The Last Picture Show McMurtry's elegiac novel of Thalia, Texas — a dying small town where teenagers come of age with nothing ahead of them, the picture show closes, and the last vestiges of frontier community give way to television, highways, and the blank anonymity of postwar America. | 1966 | Dial Press | English |