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.
McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, the son of Hazel Ruth (née McIver) and William Jefferson McMurtry, who was a rancher. 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).
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.
One of McMurtry's bookstores in Archer City, Texas
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.
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.
