Translation from English

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Born Today- Writer Larry McMurtry- wikipedia

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
Born Larry Jeff McMurtry
June 3, 1936 (age 78)
Archer City, Texas, U.S.
Education University of North Texas
Rice University
Occupation Novelist, screenwriter, essayist
Years active 1963–present
Larry Jeff McMurtry (born June 3, 1936) is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas.[1] He is known for his 1975 novel Terms of Endearment, his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning 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 television miniseries and both the films of Terms of Endearment and Brokeback Mountain won Academy Awards.

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."
One of McMurtry's bookstores in Archer City, Texas
Just one of the dozens of aisles of books at Booked Up in Archer City, Texas
Leo the store cat at Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, March 29, 2010
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

Berrybender Narratives

As Editor

  • 1999: Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories

Other Writings

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

  1. Hugh Rawson "Screenings," American Heritage, April/May 2006.
  2. Larry (Jeff) McMurtry Biography (1936-) Early years
  3. Martin Staples Shockley, Advocate of liberal arts and academic freedom, The Dallas Morning News, August 28, 2003
  4. Texas Institute of Letters- what awards are for
  5. Texas Institute of Letters Complete List of Winners Requires Adobe acrobat
  6. Lindenberger, Michael (August 15, 2012). "The Great Book Sale of Teas". Time. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
  7. Page on the author, from the New York Review of Books website
  8. "(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.
  9. "(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.
  10. 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)
  11. Granberry, Michael. "Author Larry McMurtry marries Ken Kesey’s widow". The Dallas Morning News, May 5, 2011.

External links

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