Larry McMurtry

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McMurtry, Larry [Jeff] (1936– ), novelist.After childhood and high school in Archer City, Texas, he attended North Texas State University and later Rice and Stanford. His first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), about the passing of old‐time cattle ranching, set the theme and locale of his best work: a half‐mythic West of values, freedom, and heroic friendship, not without drawbacks. Horseman was made into the movie Hud (1963). Leaving Cheyenne (1963) again explored conflicts between old ways and new. The Last Picture Show (1966), about a boy growing up in a small Texas town in the 1950s, also reached film, as did Terms of Endearment (1975), about a terminally ill woman and her eccentric mother. After Somebody's Darling (1978), Cadillac Jack (1982), and The Desert Rose (1983), McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove (1985), a bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize that later was the basis for a successful television miniseries. It chronicles the adventures of two former Texas Rangers and their sidekicks on a migratory cattle drive from Texas to Montana, with a villainous Indian, Blue Duck, as main adversary. In sweep and feeling it recalls The Big Sky. Anything for Billy (1988) has a Philadelphia dime novelist narrator hooked up with The Kid. Buffalo Girls (1990) features Bill Cody, Calamity Jane, and Sitting Bull dramatizing for urban audiences a West already gone. The Evening Star (1992) returns to the Houston and characters of Terms of Endearment, including the eccentric Aurora, who struggles to come to terms with aging. Streets of Laredo (1993) is a sequel to Lonesome Dove, set about 1890, with Captain Woodrow Call, the surviving former Texas Ranger, now an old man; he is chasing a Mexican train bandit. Some characters from the earlier work appear, others are new. The novel does not reach the level of its predecessor. McMurtry's recent fiction is highlighted by four novels comprising the Berrybender Narratives: Sin Killer (2002), The Wandering Hill (2003), By Sorrow's River (2003), and Folly and Glory (2004). McMurtry's nonfiction includes the collections In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1971), Flim Flam: Essays on Hollywood (1987), and Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays on the American West (2001); a biography, Crazy Horse (1999); an autobiographical essay, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (1999); and a tour of America's interstate highways, Roads (2000).