McMURTRY, Larry Jeff

(b. 3 June 1936 in Wichita Falls, Texas), Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, essayist, teacher, and screenwriter, best known for his novels set in 1960s Texas and about legends of the West.

McMurtry grew up on a ranch near Archer City, Texas, the son of William Jefferson McMurtry and Hazel Ruth McIver, a homemaker. Both his father and grandfather were cattle ranchers, and as a child McMurtry was immersed in the stories, myths, and histories of the West. He graduated from Archer City High School in 1954 and then attended North Texas State College in Denton, graduating with a B.A. in 1958. He went to Rice University in Houston, graduating with an M.A. in 1960. On 15 July 1959 he married Josephine Ballard; they had one son, James, who became an actor and musician. The couple divorced in 1966.

McMurtry wrote stories from an early age, and his first novels, Horseman, Pass By (1961) and Leaving Cheyenne (1963), were published while he was working as an English instructor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. His novel The Last Picture Show (1966) established him as the Southwest's most popular writer. Much of McMurtry's work is set in the southwestern United States. Most of his novels describe a post-frontier society struggling to find an identity for itself and its citizens. His first three books, published between 1961 and 1966, are set around the town of Thalia, which bears a resemblance to Archer City. They are concerned with the problems of small-town life and an existence dominated by the heroic presence of pioneering ancestors. Set in the mid-1950s, these early novels address the way rapid cultural change affects life in small-town Texas, and they struck a chord with many readers in the 1960s. McMurtry's characters are stifled by conventions and troubled by their isolation, and they face conflicts between old and new ways of life, and he offended many Texans with his bleak portrayal of their home state.

McMurtry's first novel, Horseman, Pass By, successfully filmed as Hud in 1963, tells the story of Lonnie Bannon, growing up in the harsh environment of his grandfather's ranch near Thalia in the mid-1950s. Bannon struggles with the idea that the family's way of life is coming to an end; in particular, he finds himself torn between the old-fashioned honesty and modest graft of his grandfather and the materialism and ambition of his amoral half brother Hud. Set against the background of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that threatens the ranch's survival, the novel exposes hypocrisies present in both sets of values. Horseman, Pass By set the tone for much of McMurtry's later output in that it is unsentimental about the past, yet avoids being idealistic about the future. A New York Times review of 10 June 1961 describes McMurtry as "among the most promising first novelists" of the year, but identified another common feature of McMurtry's work, its tendency to overdramatize situations and stretch "the law of probability." Perhaps for this reason, though generally well reviewed, McMurtry never really gained acceptance as a "literary" novelist.

Leaving Cheyenne followed the success of Horseman, Pass By. In it, three characters each tell the first-person story of a love triangle that spans a generation. Also set in Thalia, Leaving Cheyenne continues McMurtry's examination of cultural change in small-town America and was filmed as Loving Molly (1973). McMurtry's third novel, The Last Picture Show (1966), is also his best known. Here his description of the bleakness of small-town life is at its most intense. With its young people being drawn away to the cities, Thalia is a town of boarded-up storefronts and empty landscapes. The traditions of cattle ranching can no longer sustain its economy, while the traditions of prom queens and high school sports are no longer important to its young. The Last Picture Show was praised for its realism as a description of the Texas landscape and of the lives of the people who lived there. McMurtry accurately describes the sense of change and loss experienced in many rural American communities in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Through a series of broken relationships and the symbolic closure of the town's movie theater, The Last Picture Show also describes the transition to adulthood of Jacy and her admirers Duane and Sonny, and is considered McMurtry's finest achievement as a novelist. Its satirical sequel, Texasville, appeared in 1987. In 1971 The Last Picture Show was made into an acclaimed film by the director Peter Bogdanovich. McMurtry's story managed to capture the mood of a particular moment in the history of the West. Later novels, including the lengthy Moving On (1970) and the urban-based Terms of Endearment (1975), continue exploring the themes of changing identity, dislocated lives, and dysfunctional relationships.

Although he was a successful novelist by his late twenties, McMurtry continued to teach throughout the 1960s, including English and creative writing at Rice (1963–1965), at George Mason College (1970), and at American University, Washington, D.C. (1970–1971). In 1971 he opened Booked Up Inc. in Washington, D.C., an antiquarian bookshop that soon had branches in Archer City and Tucson, Arizona. He has received many awards, including the Wallace Stegner Fellowship (1960), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1964), and a Pulitzer Prize for his frontier novel, Lonesome Dove (1985).

By the mid-1960s McMurtry had emerged as an important voice of disaffected small-town youth, yet by the 1980s he was best known as a writer of Westerns. This was largely because of the success of Lonesome Dove (1985), which is set in nineteenth-century Texas. But, in fact, only a handful of his more than twenty novels are Westerns in the generic sense. As well as writing screenplays for television and movie versions of his novels, McMurtry also has been a regular reviewer for the Washington Post and became president of PEN (which originally stood for "Playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists") American Center in 1989. Since the 1990s, after a heart bypass operation, he has concentrated on bookselling in his hometown of Archer City.

McMurtry's papers are held in the Albert B. Alkek Library at Southwest Texas State University, and at the University of Texas Permian Basin and the University of North Texas (formerly North Texas State), while his views on Texas are expressed with characteristic frankness in In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968). McMurtry's early career is described in Thomas Landess, Larry McMurtry (1969), and an introduction to McMurtry and his work is in Mark Busby, Larry McMurtry and the West: An Ambivalent Relationship (1995). A useful collection of writings about McMurtry from the 1960s to the 1980s is Clay Reynolds, ed., Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook (1989).

Chris Routledge