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Larry McMurtry

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Larry Jeff McMurtry
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(born June 3, 1936, Wichita Falls, Texas, U.S.) U.S. novelist. The son of a rancher, he wrote dozens of novels set in the American West, often in Texas. The Last Picture Show (1966) examines the isolation of small-town life. Lonesome Dove (1985, Pulitzer Prize) is part of an epic frontier series that also includes Streets of Laredo (1993), Dead Man's Walk (1995), and Comanche Moon (1997). His other novels include Horseman, Pass By (1961), Terms of Endearment (1975), Buffalo Girls (1990), and When the Light Goes (2007). Many of his novels were adapted for film or television; he also won several Academy Awards for screenwriting.

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Works: Works by Larry McMurtry
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(b. 1936)

1961Horseman Pass By. McMurtry's first novel, which would be turned into the critically acclaimed film Hud in 1963, is the first of what has been called his Thalia trilogy, about Texas ranching and small-town life. It would be followed by Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1966).
1975Terms of Endearment. McMurtry achieves a popular success with this story of feisty widow Aurora Greenwood, her many suitors, and her daughter's terminal cancer. The story would be made into a popular film in 1983.
1985Lonesome Dove. McMurtry's affinity for the western novel achieves a kind of apotheosis in this Pulitzer Prize-winning epic chronicle about an 1879 cattle drive from Texas to Montana. The relationship between two former Texas Rangers, McCrae and Call, and their implacable foe, the Indian known as Blue Duck, makes for good reading. The book would be made into an acclaimed television mini-series and inspire a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993), and the prequels Dead Man's Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997).
1987Texasville. McMurtry returns to Thalia, Texas, and to Sonny and Duane, the memorable characters from his highly praised The Last Picture Show (1966). The problems centering on the characters' love lives (and Duane's involvement in civic affairs) receive comic treatment in a work that critics praise as a fine farewell to the phase of McMurtry's closely observed works about northern Texas.
1988Anything for Billy. This novel, set on the nineteenth-century frontier, satirizes legends about Billy the Kid. His story is related by an easterner whose imagination has been distorted by dime novels about the Old West. Critics praise McMurtry's powerful evocation of violence laced with manic, surrealistic humor.
1999Duane's Depressed. This novel completes the trilogy begun with The Last Picture Show (1966) and continued in Texasville (1989). Once again the protagonist is Duane, the considerably older mayor of Thalia, Texas, who startles his constituents by abandoning his pickup truck and walking everywhere. This signals his shake-up of community conventions, which he also challenges by consulting a young woman psychiatrist. Duane's story, critics note, shows McMurtry's fine grasp of a changing contemporary Western culture.

Quotes By: Larry Mcmurtry
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Quotes:

"True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends boyfriends -- and he accepts it."

"The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings -- crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few."

"You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two."

Wikipedia: Larry McMurtry
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Larry McMurtry
Born Larry Jeff McMurtry
June 3, 1936 (1936-06-03) (age 73)
Archer City, Texas
Occupation Novelist, screenwriter, essayist
Years active 1963-present

Larry Jeff McMurtry (born June 3, 1936) is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller, and Academy Award winning screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the "old west" or in contemporary Texas. He is known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, a historical saga that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive their cattle from the Rio Grande to a new home in the frontier of Montana, and for co-writing the adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Lonesome Dove was adapted into a hit television miniseries.

Contents

Early life

McMurtry was born in Archer City, Texas, the son of Hazel Ruth (née McIver) and William Jefferson McMurtry, who was a rancher.[1] He grew up on a ranch outside Archer City, Texas, which is the model for the town of Thalia that appears in much of his fiction. He earned degrees from North Texas State University (B.A. 1958) and Rice University (M.A. 1960).

Career

McMurtry has won the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters on three occasions; in 1962, for Horseman, Pass By; in 1967, for The Last Picture Show, which he shared with Tom Pendleton's The Iron Orchard; and in 1986, for Lonesome Dove. He has also won the Amon G. Carter award for periodical prose in 1966, for Texas: Good Times Gone or Here Again?.[2][3] 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 writers, including Ken Kesey, Peter S. Beagle, Robert Stone, and Gordon Lish. McMurtry and Kesey remained friends after McMurtry left California and returned to Texas, and Kesey's famous cross-country trip with his Merry Pranksters in a day-glo painted schoolbus 'Further' included a stop at McMurtry's home in Houston, described in Tom Wolfe's New-Journalistic book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

While at Stanford he became a rare book scout, and during his years in Houston managed a book store there called 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, which is one of the largest single used bookstores 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.

One of McMurtry's bookstores in Archer City, Texas

McMurtry has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books[4] and is a past president of PEN.[5][6][7] 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; the Peter Bogdanovich directed 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 a 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 and used his speech to promote books by reminding his audience that "Brokeback Mountain" was a short story by E. Annie Proulx before it was a movie. In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, he paid tribute to his Swiss-made Hermes 3000 typewriter.

Personal life

His son, James McMurtry, is a singer/songwriter and guitarist. His former wife Jo Scott McMurtry, an English professor, is also the author of five books.

Books, novels and films

References

  1. ^ Larry (Jeff) McMurtry Biography (1936-) Early years
  2. ^ Texas Institute of Letters- what awards are for
  3. ^ Texas Institute of Letters Complete List of Winners Requires Adobe acrobat
  4. ^ Page on the author, from the New York Review of Books website
  5. ^ "(web page from pen.org about "BOARD OF TRUSTEES HISTORY" for 1989-1990, showing that Larry McMurtry was the President of PEN at that time)". PEN American Center. Archived from the original on 2009-April 26. http://www.webcitation.org/5gJnJpLfB. Retrieved 2009-April 26. 
  6. ^ "(web page from pen.org about "BOARD OF TRUSTEES HISTORY" for 1990-1991, showing that Larry McMurtry was the President of PEN at that time)". PEN American Center. Archived from the original on 2009-April 26. http://www.webcitation.org/5gJnRZVGc. Retrieved 2009-April 26. 
  7. ^ the second-to-last paragraph of the "Biographical Sketch" section of the "Larry McMurtry Collection" web page at http://research.hrc.utexas.edu:8080/hrcxtf/view?docId=ead/00470.xml (Retrieved on 2009-April 26)

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Larry McMurtry".  Read more