McMurtry, Larry (1936—)

views updated

McMurtry, Larry (1936—)

A prolific writer of rare lyrical gifts, Larry McMurtry has enjoyed a reputation as the most eloquent voice of the contemporary American West. Born and raised in rural Texas, McMurtry published his first several novels to critical kudos, but these initial literary efforts won him few home-grown fans. Some Texans were offended by the author's irreverent and unsentimental treatment of his home state, as he exposed the limits of Texas mythology, and portrayed small towns such as Thalia (the fictional equivalent of Archer City, where McMurtry graduated from high school) as desiccated and stifling. Scholar Lera Patrick Tyler Lich describes McMurtry's dusty Thalia as "a place to go insane, a place to be lonely," noting that "a vast expanse around the town and a wind that blows into it seem to choke out life." In later works, McMurtry did equal justice to Texas's sprawling, rowdy cities as crass, commercial meccas of philistinism. Though he continually dismissed his own work as without merit, McMurtry has offered a gallery of indelible images from a region of America caught between a sylvan past and a spiritless urban and suburban future.

McMurtry was a popular high school student, active in sports and on the staffs of student publications, but an ambivalence for his West Texas environs was taking hold in the well-read young writer. After graduating from Rice University with a Master of Arts in English and winning a prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, McMurtry published Horseman, Pass By when he was just 26 years old. This wise novel about the decline of the Western way of life is essentially a coming-of-age story, as the young Lonnie Bannon surveys two opposing—and unappetizing—models of male possibility: his rancher grandfather Homer, whose diseased cattle represents a dying era, and Lonnie's Uncle Hud, a callous, cynical lady-killer whose only allegiance is to his own appetites. "Hud had made terms with the twentieth century," McMurtry notes in In A Narrow Grave, his volume of essays, "whereas Homer was unwaveringly faithful to the nineteenth." McMurtry deals Western pride a death blow as he documents the cowboy cliches passing into anachronism, as the "horsemen" either race their fancy Cadillacs or else fold up and die. McMurtry's auspicious debut invited comparisons to Thomas Wolfe and James Jones, and became the basis for a widely respected film, Hud (1963), with Paul Newman in the title role.

Throughout the 1960s, McMurtry taught English and creative writing and continued to publish compelling novels. The offbeat love story Leaving Cheyenne appeared in 1963 (it was filmed in 1973 as Lovin' Molly) and in 1966 McMurtry published perhaps his best-known work, The Last Picture Show, a bleak evocation of the isolation and emptiness of small-town life. In it he paints a forbidding landscape—"miles of lonesome country" and "a few sandscraped ranch houses." This is a world so lacking in opportunity and ambition that middle-aged town denizens can find little to do but worship high school athletes and prom queens as if they were movie stars, and prey upon them as sex objects. As the new urban frontier lures the talented and the energetic away, and as Thalia's storefronts are boarded up one by one under vast, empty skies, the author depicts "a place's loss of its only coherent tradition," according to scholar Raymond L. Neinstein. With the publication of The Last Picture Show, the New York Times praised McMurtry as "an alchemist who converts the basest materials to gold." Director Peter Bogdanovich's gritty, black-and-white film adaptation emerged as one of the most admired films of 1971, a contemporary classic contributing, in the words of Pauline Kael, to "a legendary period in movies."

The perceptive and frank In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas appeared in 1968, followed by the 800-page mega-novel of displacement and ennui, Moving On (1970), and Terms of Endearment (1975), a moving story of a complex mother-daughter relationship. When the film version of Terms of Endearment reached screens it equaled or surpassed the success of previous movie adaptations of McMurtry's work, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1983. In Somebody's Darling (1978) and The Desert Rose (1983), McMurtry explores other milieus but his favorite themes—tradition versus modernity, country versus city—are much in evidence; the former novel depicts the often mindless vagaries of the Hollywood movie industry, while the latter tells of a sweetly vapid Las Vegas stripper named Harmony and her beautiful but calculating daughter. McMurtry regards Harmony as sort of a distaff cowboy, part of "a dying breed" of buxom, lacquered showgirls. As in his male-dominated works, The Desert Rose demonstrates an older generation's innocence and helplessness in an increasingly complicated and ravening world. Horse-men are not the only ones passing by, into obscurity.

Other McMurtry novels of note include Cadillac Jack (1982); the prize-winning nineteenth century epic, Lonesome Dove (1985), which spawned a popular television mini-series; Texasville (1987), an ambitious and satirical sequel to The Last Picture Show; and the elegiac sequel to Terms of Endearment, The Evening Star (1992).

—Drew Limsky