McMurtry, Larry

Larry McMurtry, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, was born in 1936 in Wichita Falls, Texas. He spent his early years on his father's ranch outside of Archer City. He graduated from the University of North Texas in 1958 and from a graduate program at Rice University in 1960. That same year he was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His first novel Horseman, Pass By won the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 1962. Hud, a movie based on this novel, received numerous Academy Awards and nominations in 1964. His 1966 novel The Last Picture Show, about teenagers coming of age in a dying Texas town in the 1950s, was released as a movie in 1971. Lonesome Dove, perhaps his most well-known novel, was originally begun as a screenplay. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986. His collaboration with Diana Ossana for Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, (2006). He has been a rare book collector and bookstore owner, with stores in Washington, D.C. and Archer City, Texas.

From the description of Larry McMurtry screenplays, 1979-1988 and undated. (Texas Tech University). WorldCat record id: 192073276

Larry McMurtry (b. 1936) is a best-selling novelist who has written such books as "Lonesome Dove", "Anything for Billy", "Buffalo Girls", "Desert Rose" and "Cadillac Jack" as well as essays on Western topics.

From the description of McMurtry, Larry, papers, 1961-1979; 1961-1969. (University of Texas Libraries). WorldCat record id: 74752834

Larry McMurtry is probably the most well-known writer to have emerged from Texas in the twentieth century, appealing to both critics and readers with his novels of the contemporary and historic American West. His trail-drive saga Lonesome Dove earned McMurtry the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986, and many of his books have become national bestsellers. Lonesome Dove was turned into a highly-acclaimed television mini-series, and several of his novels have been made into films, most notably The Last Picture Show, which garnered McMurtry an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay, and Terms of Endearment.

Larry McMurtry was born in 1936, and grew up in Archer City, Texas, the son and the grandson of cattle ranchers. He completed his undergraduate studies at the North Texas State University, and received his M.A. in English from Rice University in 1960. In 1961 he released his first novel, Horseman, Pass By. That novel and the two which followed, Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1966), were set in the imaginary town of Thalia, and explored small town life and the changes taking place in the rural West. Between 1963 and 1969, McMurtry also taught creative writing at Rice University. In 1969 McMurtry moved to Washington D.C., where he became co-owner and operator of a rare book store called Booked Up. While living in Washington, he wrote three novels about turbulent relationships that were primarily set in Houston - Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), and Terms of Endearment (1975). His next three novels are generally considered less successful, transitional novels.

1986's Lonesome Dove was a departure for McMurtry, a rambling story set in the West of the 1870s. Since writing Lonesome Dove, he has been equally prolific in two types of book - contemporary novels such as Texasville (1987) and Evening Star (1992) which revisit characters from earlier works, and historically based novels like Anything for Billy (1988) and Buffalo Girls (1990) which tell the stories of legendary figures such as Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane. McMurtry has also released three more novels featuring characters from Lonesome Dove, the 1993 sequel Streets of Laredo, the 1996 prequel Dead Man's Walk, and the 1997 prequel Comanche Moon. Like Lonesome Dove, these novels were made into television mini-series.

McMurtry has continued to write novels, with the latest from the Last Picture Show series, Rhino Ranch, being released in 2009. In 2005, McMurtry won the Academy Award for his screenplay of the movie Brokeback Mountain, which he co-wrote with Diana Ossana. In addition to novels, McMurtry has also published books of essays, film criticism, short stories, and several volumes of memoirs. He has one son, James Lawrence, and currently lives in Archer City, Texas, where he owns a rare book store.

From the description of Larry McMurtry papers, 1955-1986. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 707521253

Larry McMurtry is the author of the book "Lonesome Dove," which was published in June 1985.

The book spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and received the 1985 Pulitzer Prize, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for Best Fictional Book, and the Spin Award for Best Western Novel of 1985. Originally, McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich wrote the film version of "Lonesome Dove" as a movie entitled "The Streets of Laredo" in 1972, with thoughts of casting John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. When the project failed, McMurtry turned it into a novel. Motown Productions acquired the film rights to the book during a meeting between McMurtry and Motown Productions president Suzanne de Passe.

Motown Productions and CBS Television partnered to air the story as an eight-hour miniseries in four episodes. Bill Witliff wrote the teleplay and served as executive producer. The miniseries was filmed in Austin, Del Rio, Texas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, from March to July 1988. Finally, the movie version aired on CBS in February 1989, starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Danny Glover, Anjelica Houston, and Diane Lane. The miniseries and the movie were both successful.

From the description of Lonesome Dove Scripts, 1987-1988 (University of Texas Libraries). WorldCat record id: 776201206