3 June 1936 – 25 March 2021
The Texas-born novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry died of congestive heart failure on 25 March 2021. He was eighty-four years old and is survived by his wife (since 2011) Norma Faye, son (and noted country/rock singer/songwriter) James and grandson Curtis (also a country/rock musician).
Many glowing tributes to McMurtry are likely to be published in the coming weeks and months and with good reason. In a prolific career spanning more than five decades, he wrote three truly unforgettable novels — Horseman, Pass By (1961), The Last Picture Show (1966) and Terms of Endearment (1975) — and more than thirty others which, while perhaps not as noteworthy in the opinion of certain jaded literary critics, nevertheless rank among the best and most consistently entertaining pieces of fiction ever published in the United States. He was also the author of three memoirs, as many volumes of essays and numerous works of popular history, nearly all of which cover some aspect of the Old West, a place and time he recreated (some might say defined) with astonishing accuracy in his monumental, Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove tetralogy (1985-1997).
I can think of almost no modern North American writer who was more versatile than McMurtry. Like Shakespeare, he grappled with every human emotion, writing novels that transcended labels like 'popular fiction' and 'regional fiction' (he sometimes wore a t-shirt in the early 1970s with the words 'Minor Regional Novelist' printed on it to poke fun at his detractors) to stand as unparalleled and often deeply moving portraits of his nation and its struggles with unchecked expansionism, modernization and the culture of conspicuous consumption, the destruction of native peoples and personal morality. That he was able to do this using plain, easily understood language while making his characters and plots so recognizably human (and often extremely funny into the bargain) only makes his achievements that much more impressive. He had no imitators for the simple reason that his style sprang so naturally from who and what he was — the son and grandson of ranchers from Archer City, the small Texas town where he was born on 3 June 1936. 'It was a modest world,' he wrote of his family's ranch in his thought-provoking 1999 memoir Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, 'nothing one could compare to the great ranches of the Panhandle, the Trans-Pecos or south Texas, but it was so sharply and simply defined that it has, ever after, drawn a kind of border about my imagination, geographywise. I see that hill, those few buildings, that spring, the highway to the east, trees to the south, the limitless plain to the north, whenever I sit down to describe a place. I move from the hill to whatever place I'm then describing, whether it's south Texas or Las Vegas, but I always leave from that hill, the hill of youth.'
McMurtry was also someone whose lifelong love of books — as treasured physical objects as much as commercially marketable products — was nothing short of obsessive, seeing him amass a collection of more than 400,000 volumes before he began to sell them off piecemeal in the Booked Up second-hand bookstore he owned and operated in his hometown — a business he tried to close in 2012, only to have his fellow townsfolk band together to insist it remain open. (Booked Up occupied six different locations in Archer City at one time, with the number eventually being whittled down to one which remains in business to this day.) His passing could be viewed as the swansong of what has been, for close to a decade now, a moribund publishing industry struggling to maintain its relevance in an increasingly digitalized world, a world that neither he nor anybody else (anybody else, at least, who wasn't working in the genre of speculative fiction) could have foreseen when his debut novel was published in 1961. But even that aspect of his nature was not without its ironic side for, as he himself once explained, 'I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds.'
Writers of McMurtry's stature and longevity are indeed a vanishing breed. He may be remembered for winning the Pulitzer Prize and co-writing screenplays which went on to win Academy Awards, but he was first and foremost a widely read novelist who, while financially successful if largely ignored by academic critics who never write fiction themselves yet inexplicably get to decide what does and does not constitute 'great literature,' never lost sight of what made the job he did both interesting and meaningful. 'I had expected to be thrilled,' he wrote in his 2009 memoir Literary Life, 'when I received my first copy of my first book, but when I opened the package and held the first copy in my hand, I found that I just felt sort of flat. I learned then and have relearned many times since, that the best part of a writer's life is actually doing it, making up characters, filling the blank page, creating scenes that readers in distant places might connect to. The thrill lies in the rush of sentences, the gradual arrival of characters who at once seem to have their own life.'
His characters certainly have that, guaranteeing that his work will be read long after the latest literary fad has receded into well deserved obscurity. Few writers have influenced me more than Larry McMurtry and few have been as comforting to me during times of doubt and trouble. His was a voice of reason and rare common sense, tinged with its own special and charming brand of irony, that will be sorely missed by myself and thousands of other grateful readers the whole world over.
Use the link below to read the obituary of North American novelist, essayist, screenwriter and antiquarian bookseller LARRY McMURTRY:
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