Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
1999
Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways
2000
Paradise
2001
Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West
2001
The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America
2005
Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West, 1846-1890
2005
Books: A Memoir
2008
Literary Life: A Second Memoir
2009
Hollywood: A Third Memoir
2010
Custer
2012
About Larry McMurtry
Larry McMurtry (1936 to 2021) was an American novelist, essayist and screenwriter whose books are set mostly in the Old West or in contemporary Texas. He wrote more than thirty novels, among them “The Last Picture Show”, “Terms of Endearment” and “Lonesome Dove”, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, on 3 June 1936, into a family of ranchers, and grew up in the nearby town of Archer City. Archer City became the model for Thalia, the fictional town where several of his novels take place. He took a BA at the University of North Texas in 1958 and an MA at Rice University in 1960, then spent a year as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, where Ken Kesey and Wendell Berry were among his fellow students.
His first novel, “Horseman, Pass By” (1961), was filmed as “Hud” with Paul Newman. “Leaving Cheyenne” (1963) and “The Last Picture Show” (1966) followed, and both were also filmed. He then wrote a group of novels set in Houston with recurring characters, including “Moving On”, “All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers” and “Terms of Endearment”. The 1983 film of “Terms of Endearment” won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
“Lonesome Dove” (1985) began as a screenplay idea developed with the director Peter Bogdanovich. The novel follows two retired Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, who drive a herd of cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana. It sold more than four million copies and was adapted in 1989 as a television miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. McMurtry returned to the characters in “Streets of Laredo”, “Dead Man’s Walk” and “Comanche Moon”, each of which also became a miniseries.
Later fiction includes the five Duane Moore novels that begin with “The Last Picture Show”, the four Berrybender Narratives about an English hunting party in the American West, and two novels written with Diana Ossana. He and Ossana won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain” (2005). McMurtry was also an antiquarian bookseller, running shops called Booked Up in Washington, D.C. and Archer City, and he served as president of PEN American Center from 1989 to 1991.
He received the National Humanities Medal in 2014, the year his last novel, “The Last Kind Words Saloon”, was published. McMurtry died at his home in Tucson, Arizona, on 25 March 2021.
