Larry McMurtry, a prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Oscar-winning screenwriter, has died at age 84. He was beloved for riveting and yet unsentimental depictions of the American West in books such as Lonesome Dove as well as for tales of family drama including Terms of Endearment.
In a statement, his representative Amanda Lundberg said McMurtry "passed away last night, on March 25 of heart failure at 84 years old surrounded by his loved ones who he lived with including long time writing partner Diana Ossana, his wife Norma Faye and their three dogs."
In all, McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels as well as over a dozen nonfiction works that spanned memoir, history and essays. He wrote over 20 screenplays and television scripts as well.
McMurtry served as the president of PEN America's Board of Trustees for two years, beginning in 1989. That year, he testified before Congress to oppose provisions of federal immigration laws that had allowed the U.S. to exclude writers and others on ideological grounds; some of those provisions were repealed. In addition, he defended fellow author Salman Rushdie after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death threat against Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses.
When he won an Oscar in 2006 for the screenplay adaption of E. Annie Proulx's short story Brokeback Mountain, which he co-wrote with Ossana, his longtime writing partner, he thanked booksellers.
"From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world," he said, "all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book, a wonderful culture, which we mustn't lose."
Filmmakers were drawn to McMurtry's work; his books Horseman, Pass By (adapted as Hud), The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment were all made into films. Lonesome Dove, his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, became a successful TV miniseries in 1989, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones.
Born in 1936 on a Texas ranch, McMurtry came to his love of the West through his family. His grandfather broke horses, and his father raised cattle.
"The West is mostly a very beautiful place," he told NPR's All Things Considered in 2014. "There are all those lovely spaces. There are all those running horses. It's a poetic imagery and it's been there for a long time."
But he wanted to scour that landscape of sentimental nostalgia for cowboys, he added. "To me it was hollow and I think it was hollow for my father, although he might not have ever brought that to his conscious mind. He totally loved cowboys and so did most of the cowboys we worked with and that got him through his life. But he knew perfectly well, so did we, that it wouldn't last another generation, it just was not going to last."
LARRY MCMURTRY: Of course, I come from ranching stock. I had nine uncles who were cattlemen. My father was a cattleman. Some of my uncles were old enough to participate a little bit in the last years of the trail driving era, which only lasted one generation. The reason they were trail drives is because there were no railroads to transport the cattle to market. As soon as there were railroads, it became very inefficient to drive cattle hundreds and thousands of miles, and, of course, they stopped.
So - but the myth of the cowboy as we have it today came out of that roughly 20-year period 20, 25 years after the Civil War in which the range cattle industry suddenly started - flowered kind of like the oil industry did a bit later in which it was necessary to get all the cattle in South Texas, millions of them, North to the markets. And it's very different from ranch life, which is not particularly romantic and not particularly cinematic.
So most of the myth of the cowboy came out of that one generation of trail drivers. And it was perfectly possible since cowboys were often very young - 13, 14, 15 years old; my uncles all left home before they were 14 and became cattlemen - perfectly possible for one boy to have gone up the trail with the first herds in the - say, the mid-'60s right after the Civil War, and the last herds in the mid-'80s are a little bit later. So it was all over in a very brief period of time. And the fact that it lasted such a short while lent a certain romance and a certain poignancy to it.
TERRY GROSS: So you grew up on a cattle ranch.
L MCMURTRY: Yeah, on a small ranch in central - north central Texas, just below the Red River near a town called Wichita Falls, about a hundred miles west of Dallas, Fort Worth Northwest.
GROSS: Did your father expect you to keep on the ranch and...
L MCMURTRY: I think he might have liked it. It was evident pretty early that this was not going to be my skill. It was also - my father was - you know, was not dumb. And he saw that the cattle business had already ceased to be a viable family business unless you own immense, immense amounts of land, which we didn't. And even my uncles who left home early and got to the panhandle when it was open range and ended up with very substantial amounts of land couldn't survive as ranchers.
Ranching is an industry almost entirely supported by oil or by other money. You know, the ranchers now are doctors and lawyers and architects and people who have gotten rich in other professions. It's - my father foresaw this as early as I can remember, which is by the mid-'40s. He saw that the amount of land that we had - well, he - you know, he made a decent living throughout his life. He was very, very skilled. But he was still in debt for 55 years. And he had four children. There's no way that if you divide that ranch by four that it can make a living for anybody. You wouldn't make a living for anybody even if it wasn't divided by four. And that was foreseen by my father very early on.
GROSS: What was the life that you imagined you wanted when you were growing up in Texas, realizing that you wanted to get off the cattle ranch and you wanted to get out of this small town?
L MCMURTRY: Well, I wanted a life in literature, essentially, and I realized that quite young. I didn't imagine that I would become a writer, but I knew that I could become a reader. And so reading drew me. Reading has always drawn me from the age of 5 or 6. It drew me out of the small town. It drew me to Houston, to Rice University. And it was sort of the strongest motivating factor for most of my youth. And as it turned out, you know, like many readers, I began to try it for myself to see if I could do this thing that had given me so much pleasure, and I was lucky and successful. But it was reading that took me off the range.
GROSS: Were there bookstores around when you were growing up...
L MCMURTRY: No.
GROSS: ...So you could get what you wanted?
L MCMURTRY: I had almost no books until I got to Rice. I did have a cousin who, as he was going off to war in 1941 - I was, like, 5 at the time - stopped by the ranch house on his way to what turned out to be the Pacific Theater and left me some books - 19 books, in fact, a tiny - just a bunch of sort of the normal boys' books of the time. And that was my library for quite a spell. There were - you know, there were some books in the high school library in Archer City but not a whole lot. And I didn't really have adequate literary resources until I was a college student. Perhaps that's one reason, you know, I'm a rare bookseller as well as an author.