Larry McMurtry
Larry Jeff McMurtry was born on June 3, 1936, on a ranch in Archer County, in north Texas, into a cattle-ranching family that had lived in that stretch of the great plains for three generations. He grew up in the small town of Archer City, an experience of the Texas frontier and its passing that would become the animating subject of his life’s work. He was a voracious and unusual reader in a community not given to books, and he educated himself partly through mail-order books he ordered from used bookshops in Forth Worth and Houston. He attended North Texas State University, then Rice University in Houston, before studying creative writing at Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow in 1960–61. He later became an antiquarian bookseller and assembled one of the largest private book collections in the United States, selling much of it through his bookshop in Archer City.
McMurtry’s first three novels — Horseman, Pass By (1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show (1966) — established him as a writer of the dying Texas frontier and the stifling claustrophobia of small-town Texas life. Horseman, Pass By was adapted as the film Hud (1963), and The Last Picture Show was memorably filmed by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971. These early works are elegies for the cattle culture McMurtry had grown up in and was watching disappear — spare, melancholy novels in the tradition of the Western pastoral.
Lonesome Dove, published in 1985, is McMurtry’s masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. At over 900 pages, it follows the cattle drive of two retired Texas Rangers — the philosophical, life-loving Gus McCrae and the taciturn, driven Captain Call — as they push a herd of cattle from the Texas border to the Montana frontier in the 1870s. The novel is an epic in the classical sense: vast in scope, populated with a rich cast of characters whose fates interweave with the historical currents of post–Civil War American westward expansion. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986 and was adapted as a beloved television miniseries in 1989 that introduced its characters to an enormous popular audience. Lonesome Dove simultaneously fulfilled and complicated the mythology of the Western, honoring the heroism and freedom of the frontier while unflinchingly depicting its violence, racism, and brutal indifference.
McMurtry’s prose is clean, direct, and deeply sympathetic to a range of human types. He was particularly gifted at depicting male friendship and masculine stoicism — the code of the cowboy culture — with both celebration and elegy. His women characters, often overlooked in assessments of his work, are sharply drawn studies in survival and compromise in a world designed to limit their possibilities. He produced more than thirty novels, several volumes of memoir and essays, and numerous screenplays, including the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005, co-written with Diana Ossana).
Larry McMurtry died on March 25, 2021, in Archer City, Texas, aged eighty-four. He remains the defining chronicler of the American West in the twentieth century, the writer who most thoroughly mapped the mythological and human landscape of Texas and the frontier from their days of glory through their dissolution into the modern American present. Lonesome Dove endures as one of the essential American novels: a work that earns its epic ambitions through the depth and generosity of its human observation.
