Larry McMurtry
An excellent writer-- also of non-fiction, his book "Paradise"(2002) about traveling to Tahiti and seeing the modern rich tourists wandering around the landscape is one of the best travel books I have ever read...
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Larry McMurtry | |
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Born | Larry Jeff McMurtry June 3, 1936 Archer City, Texas, U.S. |
Education | University of North Texas Rice University |
Occupation | Novelist, screenwriter, essayist |
Years active | 1963–present |
Contents
Early life
McMurtry was born in Archer City, Texas, 25 miles from Wichita Falls, Texas, the son of Hazel Ruth (née McIver) and William Jefferson McMurtry, who was a rancher.[2] He grew up on a ranch outside Archer City, which is the model for the town of Thalia that appears in much of his fiction. He earned degrees from the University of North Texas (B.A. 1958) and Rice University (M.A. 1960). Martin Staples Shockley, PhD (1908–2003), was one of McMurtry's English professors at North Texas.[3]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?.[4][5] 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 school bus 'Further' included a stop at McMurtry's home in Houston, described in Tom Wolfe's New-Journalistic book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At the time (1964), McMurtry was also a Lecturer in English at Rice University. His students were entertained with stories of Hollywood and the filming of Hud for which he was consulting.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. However, in early 2012 the decision was finally made to downsize and sell off the greater portion of his inventory. He made the decision as he felt the collection was a liability for his heirs.[6] The auction was conducted on August 10 and 11, 2012, and was overseen by Addison & Sarova Auctioneers of Macon, GA. The books that were sold were those being stored in Buildings 2, 3, and 4; Building 1 will remain open with books for sale to the general public for the foreseeable future. This epic book auction sold books by the shelf, and was billed as "The Last Booksale," in keeping with the title of McMurtry's award-winning novel The Last Picture Show. Dealers, collectors, and gawkers came out en masse from all corners of the country to witness this historic auction. As stated by Mr. McMurtry on the week-end of the sale, "I've never seen that many people lined up in Archer City, and I'm sure I never will again."
McMurtry has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books[7] and is a past president of PEN.[8][9][10] 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 1986, McMurtry received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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. On May 5, 2011, The Dallas Morning News reported that McMurtry married Norma Faye Kesey, the widow of writer Ken Kesey, on April 29 in a civil ceremony in Archer City.[11]Fiction
Standalone novels
- 1961: Horseman, Pass By - adapted for film as Hud
- 1963: Leaving Cheyenne - adapted for film as Lovin' Molly
- 1982: Cadillac Jack
- 1988: Anything For Billy (fictionalised bio of Billy the Kid)
- 1990: Buffalo Girls (fictionalised bio of Calamity Jane) - adapted for TV as Buffalo Girls
- 1994: Pretty Boy Floyd (with Diana Ossana) (fictionalised bio of titular gangster)
- 1997: Zeke and Ned (with Diana Ossana) (fictionalised bio of the last Cherokee warriors)
- 2000: Boone's Lick
- 2005: Loop Group
- 2006: Telegraph Days
- 2014: The Last Kind Words Saloon
Harmony & Pepper series
- 1983: The Desert Rose
- 1995: The Late Child
Duane Moore series
- 1966: The Last Picture Show - adapted for film as The Last Picture Show
- 1987: Texasville - adapted for film as Texasville
- 1999: Duane's Depressed
- 2007: When The Light Goes
- 2009: Rhino Ranch: A Novel
Houston series
- 1970: Moving On (Patsy Carpenter/Danny Deck/Emma Horton/Joe Percy)
- 1972: All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers (Danny Deck/Jill Peel)
- 1975: Terms of Endearment (Emma Horton/Aurora Greenaway) - adapted for film as Terms of Endearment
- 1978: Somebody's Darling (Jill Peel/Joe Percy)
- 1989: Some Can Whistle (Danny Deck)
- 1992: The Evening Star (Aurora Greenaway) - adapted for film as The Evening Star
Gus McCrae & Woodrow Call series
- 1985: Lonesome Dove, 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner - adapted for TV miniseries as Lonesome Dove
- 1993: Streets of Laredo - adapted for TV miniseries as Streets of Laredo
- 1995: Dead Man's Walk - adapted for TV miniseries as Dead Man's Walk
- 1997: Comanche Moon
Berrybender Narratives
- 2002: Sin Killer
- 2003: The Wandering Hill
- 2003: By Sorrow's River
- 2004: Folly and Glory
As Editor
- 1999: Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories
Other Writings
- 1988: The Murder of Mary Phagan - TV movie
- 1990: Montana - TV movie
- 1992: Memphis - TV movie
- 1992: Falling from Grace - film starring John Mellencamp
- 2002: Johnson County War - TV mini-series
- 2005: Brokeback Mountain (with Diana Ossana) - Oscar-winning screenplay (adapted from the short story by E. Annie Proulx)
Non-Fiction
- 1968: In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
- 1974: It's Always We Rambled (essay)
- 1987: Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood
- 1999: Crazy Horse: A Life (biography)
- 1999: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
- 2000: Roads: Driving America's Great Highways
- 2001: Sacagawea's Nickname—essays on the American West
- 2002: Paradise—South-Pacific travelogue/memoir
- 2005: The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley & the Beginnings of Superstardom in America
- 2005: Oh What A Slaughter! : Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890
- 2008: Books: A Memoir
- 2009: Literary Life: A Second Memoir
- 2011: Hollywood: A Third Memoir
- 2012: Custer
See also
References
- Hugh Rawson "Screenings," American Heritage, April/May 2006.
- Larry (Jeff) McMurtry Biography (1936-) Early years
- Martin Staples Shockley, Advocate of liberal arts and academic freedom, The Dallas Morning News, August 28, 2003
- Texas Institute of Letters- what awards are for
- Texas Institute of Letters Complete List of Winners Requires Adobe acrobat
- Lindenberger, Michael (August 15, 2012). "The Great Book Sale of Teas". Time. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
- Page on the author, from the New York Review of Books website
- "(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 2009-04-26. Retrieved 2009-04-26.
- "(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 2009-04-26. Retrieved 2009-04-26.
- 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)
- Granberry, Michael. "Author Larry McMurtry marries Ken Kesey’s widow". The Dallas Morning News, May 5, 2011.
External links
- Larry McMurtry Collection, from the Rare Book & Texana Collections, University of North Texas website
- McMurtry, Larry. "The Author Who Sold Books", Washingtonian, August 1, 2008.
- Larry McMurtry Papers 1984-1991, from the Texas State University-San Marcos website
- Larry McMurtry at the Internet Movie Database
- Larry McMurtry at DMOZ
- The Treasure Hunter Michael Dirda review of McMurtry's Books: A Memoir from The New York Review of Books
- Larry McMurtry screenplays, 1979-1988 and undated, in the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University
- Guide to the Larry McMurtry and Diana Osanna Papers, 1890-2004, in the Woodson Research Center at Rice University
- New York Times Article regarding "The Last Booksale"
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Categories:
- 1936 births
- 20th-century American novelists
- 21st-century American novelists
- American historians
- American male novelists
- American military historians
- BAFTA winners (people)
- Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award winners
- Chick lit writers
- Living people
- People from Wichita Falls, Texas
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners
- Rice University alumni
- University of North Texas alumni
- Writers from Texas
- Writers Guild of America Award winners
- Western (genre) writers
- Guggenheim Fellows
- Best Screenplay Golden Globe winners
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