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| Larry McMurtry | |
Larry McMurtry, the prolific novelist and screenwriter--and legendary bookseller--"who demythologized the American West with his unromantic depictions of life on the 19th-century frontier and in contemporary small-town Texas," died March 25, the New York Times reported. He was 84. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and several books of essays, memoir and history. His work also includes over 30 screenplays, including the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain (with Diana Ossana, his friend and writing partner).
His greatest commercial and critical success was Lonesome Dove, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular TV mini-series. The Times noted that from the beginning of his career, McMurtry's books "were attractive to filmmakers," including Horseman, Pass By (Hud, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman), The Last Picture Show (starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd, directed by Peter Bogdanovich) and Terms of Endearment (directed by James L. Brooks and starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson), which won the best picture Oscar in 1983.
In a handwritten note, Lonesome Dove star Robert Duvall told the Associated Press that McMurtry "was one of our most gifted of writers and one to be truly missed and revered.... Being in the TV series Lonesome Dove was the highlight of my life and for this I owe him great amounts of gratitude. His works reached out and blessed so many!"
James L. Brooks tweeted: "Sitting here thinking of the greatness of Larry McMurtry. Among the best writers ever. I remember when he sent me on my way to adapt Terms--his refusal to let me hold him in awe. And the fact that he was personally working the cash register of his rare bookstore as he did so."
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| Booked Up in Archer City. Tex. | |
For 50 years, McMurtry was also a serious antiquarian bookseller. While living in the Washington, D.C., area, he opened Booked Up in 1971 with a partner, and in 1988 launched a much larger bookstore in Archer City, Tex., which he owned and operated until his death. Booked Up "is one of America's largest," the Times wrote. "It once occupied six buildings and contained some 400,000 volumes. In 2012 Mr. 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.' " His private library held about 30,000 books, spread over three houses. He called compiling it a life's work, "an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves."
From 1989 to 1991, McMurtry served as president of PEN America. The AP noted that the group's current president, Ayad Akhtar, said McMurtry was "through and through a vigorous defender of the freedom to write." In 2014, President Obama presented him with a National Humanities Medal for work that "evokes the character and drama of the American West with stories that examine quintessentially American lives."
McMurtry's other books include the novels Cadillac Jack, Somebody's Darling, The Desert Rose, The Last Kind Words Saloon, Streets of Laredo and Buffalo Girls; as well as nonfiction works Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Books: A Memoir, Literary Life: A Second Memoir and Hollywood: A Third Memoir.
On Twitter, many writers paid tribute, including Stephen King ("Larry McMurtry was a great storyteller. I learned from him, which was important. I was entertained by him, which was ALL important. RIP, cowboy. Horseman, pass by."), Don Winslow ("No tweet can express or explain how much I loved Larry McMurtry's writing. I'm really crushed by his passing. Rest in Power Larry McMurtry. Legend.") and Michael Chabon ("Goodbye to the great #LarryMcMurtry, my mother's favorite novelist, the only writer I ever saw her get at all fan-girly about, to the point of making a pilgrimage w/ a gf to Booked Up, his Georgetown shop, sometime in the late 1970s, just to get a glimpse of him.").
The Los Angeles Times reported that Michael Korda, McMurtry's editor at Simon & Schuster, had once described the novelist as "the Flaubert of the Plains" for his "sure eye for the bleak landscape of small-town Texas and the isolated ranches of the Panhandle, as well as the history of the West."
"He cast a big shadow across the landscape," said journalist and Texan Lawrence Wright. "There are very few other writers in Texas history that had the popular appeal that he did.... He was always writing about America, but it was set in the Texas part of America."
McMurtry's obituary in the L.A. Times concluded: "His words were an expression of a lifetime devoted to the printed page and a nearly religious belief that reading is essential to humanity."