Larry McMurtry

Infobox Actor
name = Larry McMurtry

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imagesize = 240px
birthname = Larry Jeff McMurtry
birthdate = birth date and age|1936|6|3
birthplace = Wichita Falls, Texas
occupation = Novelist, screenwriter, essayist
yearsactive = 1963-"present"
academyawards = Best Adapted Screenplay
2005 "Brokeback Mountain"
baftaawards = Best Screenplay
1972 "The Last Picture Show"
Best Adapted Screenplay
2005 "Brokeback Mountain"
goldenglobeawards = Best Screenplay
2006 "Brokeback Mountain"

Larry Jeff McMurtry (born June 3, 1936) is an American novelist, screenwriter, essayist and bookseller. He is known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel "Lonesome Dove", a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive their cattle from the Rio Grande to a new home in the frontier of Montana. It was adapted into a hit television miniseries. Much of his other fiction is also set in the "old west" or contemporary Texas.

Biography

Early life

McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, the son of Hazel Ruth (née McIver) and William Jefferson McMurtry, who was a rancher. [ [http://www.filmreference.com/film/32/Larry-Jeff-McMurtry.html Larry (Jeff) McMurtry Biography (1936-) ] ] He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia. He earned degrees from North Texas State University (B.A. 1958) and Rice University (M.A. 1960).

Career

He published his first novels while an English instructor, and he won the 1962 Texas Institute of Letters Jesse M. Jones award. In 1964 he was awarded a Guggenheim grant. In 1960, McMurtry was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he studied the craft of fiction under novelist Wallace Stegner and alongside a number of other future literary luminaries, including Ken Kesey, Peter S. Beagle, Robert Stone, and Gordon Lish. McMurtry and Kesey maintained a close friendship after McMurtry left California and returned to Texas, and Kesey's famous cross-country trip with his Merry Pranksters in the day-glo painted schoolbus 'Furthur' included a memorable stop at McMurtry's home in Houston, described in Tom Wolfe's New-Journalistic masterpiece "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test".

As a person whose life was profoundly changed and enriched by reading, McMurtry has been a tireless champion of "the culture of the book." While at Stanford he became a well-known rare book scout, and during his years in Houston managed a legendary book store there, the Bookman. In 1969 he moved to the Washington, D. C. area, and in 1970 with two partners started a bookshop in Georgetown which he named Booked Up. In 1988 he opened another Booked Up in Archer City, establishing the town as an American "book city." The Archer City store is arguably the largest single used bookstore in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000 titles. Citing economic pressures from Internet bookselling, McMurtry came close to shutting down the Archer City store in 2005, but chose to keep it open after an outpouring of public support.

A prolific, award-winning, and highly-respected literary writer, McMurtry has been a regular contributor to "The New York Review of Books" for years and is a past president of PEN. To the general public, however, he is perhaps best known for the film adaptations of his work, especially "Hud" (from the novel "Horseman, Pass By"), starring Paul Newman and Patricia Neal; Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece, "The Last Picture Show"; James L. Brooks's "Terms of Endearment", which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture (1984); and "Lonesome Dove", which became an enormously popular television mini-series starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.

In 2006, he was co-winner (with Diana Ossana) of both the Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain." He accepted his Oscar wearing jeans and cowboy boots along with his dinner jacket—which Academy Awards host Jon Stewart made fun of immediately—and paid homage to his love for books by reminding everybody that Brokeback Mountain was a short story by Annie E. Proulx before it was a movie. In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, he famously paid tribute to his Swiss-made Hermes 3000 typewriter.

Personal life

His son, James McMurtry, is a singer/songwriter and guitarist whose powerful protest song "We Can't Make It Here" won the Americana Award as song of the year in 2007. His former wife Jo Scott McMurtry, an English professor, is also the author of five books.

Books, novels and films

*1961 - "Horseman, Pass By" - adapted for film as "Hud"
*1963 - "Leaving Cheyenne" - adapted for film as "Lovin' Molly"
*1966 - "The Last Picture Show" - adapted into a film of the same name
*1968 - "In A Narrow Grave"
*1970 - "Moving On"
*1972 - "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers"
*1974 - "It's Always We Rambled" (essay)
*1975 - "Terms of Endearment" - adapted into a film of the same name
*1978 - "Somebody's Darling"
*1982 - "Cadillac Jack"
*1983 - "Desert Rose"
*1985 - "Lonesome Dove", 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner, and first of what became a series
*1987 - "Texasville" - adapted into a film of the same name - A continuation of the story begun in "The Last Picture Show"
*1987 - "Film Flam"
*1988 - "Anything For Billy"
*1988 - "The Murder of Mary Phagan" - TV story
*1989 - "Some Can Whistle"
*1990 - "Buffalo Girls" - adapted into a TV movie
*1990 - "Montana" - TV movie
*1992 - "The Evening Star" - adapted for film as "The Evening Star" - A continuation of the story begun in "Terms of Endearment"
*1992 - "Memphis" - TV movie
*1992 - Falling from Grace
*1993 - "Streets of Laredo", another in the Lonesome Dove series
*1994 - "Pretty Boy Floyd" (with Diana Ossana)
*1995 - "Dead Man's Walk", another in the Lonesome Dove series
*1995 - "The Late Child"
*1997 - "Comanche Moon", the last as of 2007 of the Lonesome Dove series
*1997 - "Zeke and Ned" (with Diana Ossana)
*1999 - "Crazy Horse"
*1999 - "Duane's Depressed" - A continuation of "The Last Picture Show" and "Texasville" story
*1999 - "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen"
*1999 - "Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories"
*2000 - "Roads: Driving America's Great Highways"
*2000 - "Boone's Lick"
*2001 - "Sacagawea's Nickname" (essays on the American West)
*2002 - "Sin Killer" - The Berrybender Narratives, Book 1
*2002 - Paradise
*2002 - "Johnson County War" - TV mini-series
*2003 - "The Wandering Hill" - The Berrybender Narratives, Book 2
*2003 - "By Sorrow's River" - The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3
*2004 - "" - The Berrybender Narratives, Book 4
*2005 - "Brokeback Mountain" - Oscar-winning screenplay (adapted from the short story by E. Annie Proulx)
*2005 - "The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley & the Beginnings of Superstardom in America" (May)
*2005 - "Oh What A Slaughter!" (Nov)
*2005 - "Loop Group" (Dec)
*2006 - "Telegraph Days" (May)
*2007 - "When The Light Goes" (Feb) - A continuation of "The Last Picture Show", "Texasville", and "Duane's Depressed" story
*2008 - "Books: A Memoir"

References

External links

*McMurtry, Larry. " [http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/8844.html The Author Who Sold Books] ", "Washingtonian", August 1, 2008.
* [http://alkek.library.txstate.edu/swwc/archives/writers/mcmurtry.html Larry McMurtry Papers 1984-1991] , from the Texas State University-San Marcos website
* [http://www.rice.edu/fondren/woodson/mss/ms276.html Guide to the Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana Papers, with Biography] , from the Rice University website
* [http://www.library.unt.edu/rarebooks/finding/mcmurtry/default.htm Larry McMurtry Collection] , from the Rare Book & Texana Collections, University of North Texas website
* [http://www.nybooks.com/authors/3 Page on the author] , from the New York Review of Books website
* [http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/10/specials/mcmurtry.html Featured author article] , from the "New York Times" website
* [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0573505/ Filmography] from the IMDb
* [http://dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Authors/M/McMurtry,_Larry/ Open Directory Category]
* [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21720 The Treasure Hunter] Michael Dirda review of McMurtry's "Books: A Memoir" from "The New York Review of Books"

* [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/ttusw/00270/tsw-00270.html Larry McMurtry screenplays, 1979-1988 and undated, in the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University]