Tuesday, March 30th, 2021Remembering Larry McMurtry
Larry Jeff McMurtry (June 3, 1936 – March 25, 2021) was an American novelist, essayist, bookseller, and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas.
He was born in Archer City, Texas, 25 miles from Wichita Falls. He grew up on a ranch outside Archer City. The city was the model for the town of Thalia which is a setting for much of his fiction.
After graduating high school, he earned degrees from the University of North Texas (B.A. 1958) and Rice University (M.A. 1960).
McMurtry married Jo Scott, who is an English professor and has authored five books. Before divorcing, they had a son together, James McMurtry. Both he and his son (Larry's grandson) Curtis McMurtry are singer/songwriters and guitarists. McMurtry married Norma Faye Kesey, the widow of writer Ken Kesey, on April 29, 2011, in a civil ceremony in Archer City.
During the 1960–1961 academic year, McMurtry was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he studied the craft of fiction under Frank O'Connor and Malcolm Cowley, alongside other aspiring writers, including Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Peter S. Beagle, and Gurney Norman.
In 1963, McMurtry returned to Rice University, where he served as a lecturer in English until 1969. He was known for entertaining some of his early students with accounts of Hollywood and the filming of
Hud, for which he was consulting.
In 1964, McMurtry was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
McMurtry won numerous awards from the Texas Institute of Letters: three times the Jesse H. Jones Award — in 1962, for
Horseman, Pass By; in 1967, for
The Last Picture Show, which he shared with Tom Pendleton's The Iron Orchard; and in 1986, for Lonesome Dove. He won the Amon G. Carter award for periodical prose in 1966 for
Texas: Good Times Gone or Here Again? and the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1984. In 1986, McMurtry received the annual Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award from the Tulsa Library Trust.
He was a vigorous defender of free speech, and while serving as president of PEN from 1989 to 1991, courageously led the organization's efforts to support the writer Salman Rushdie, whose novel
The Satanic Verses (1988) caused a major controversy among some Muslims, with the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issuing a fatwā calling for Rushdie's assassination, after which attempts were made on his life.
In 1989, McMurtry testified on behalf of PEN America before the U.S. Congress in opposition to immigration rules in the 1952 McCarran–Walter Act that for decades permitted the visa denial and deportation of foreign writers for ideological reasons. He recounted how before American PEN was to host the 1986 International PEN Congress,
"there was a serious question as to whether such a meeting could in fact take place in this country... the McCarran-Walter Act could have effectively prevented such a gathering in the United States." He denounced the relevant rules as
"an affront to all who cherish the constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression and association. To a writer whose living depends upon the uninhibited interchange of ideas and experiences, these provisions are especially appalling." Subsequently, some provisions that excluded certain classes of immigrants based on their political beliefs were revoked by the Immigration Act of 1990.
McMurtry became well known for the film adaptations of his work, which were seen by many viewers, especially
Hud (from the novel
Horseman, Pass By), starring Paul Newman and Patricia Neal; the Peter Bogdanovich–directed
The Last Picture Show; James L. Brooks's
Terms of Endearment, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture (1984); and
Lonesome Dove, which became a popular television miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.
In 2006, he was co-winner (with Diana Ossana) of both the Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for
Brokeback Mountain, adapted from a short story by E. Annie Proulx. He accepted his Oscar while wearing a dinner jacket over jeans and cowboy boots. In his speech, he promoted books, reminding the audience the movie was developed from a short story. In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, he paid tribute to his Swiss-made Hermes 3000 typewriter.
Larry McMurtry has written 9 stand-alone novels, a trilogy, 4 different series, numerous non-fiction writings, 9 different movies, and 13 different TV projects.
McMurtry died on March 25, 2021, at his home in Archer City, Texas. He was 84 years old.
All information for this issue of TDS was taken from the Wikipedia page for Larry McMurtry. You can see more information and lists of all of his works and awards there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McMurtryThe Larry McMurtry Thread on the Forum
In honor of Larry McMurtry, we have reopened the Larry McMurtry thread we have here on the forum.
If you've read any of his books, or seen any of the movies/TV shows that he's worked on or been based on his works, please feel free to comment.
https://ultimatebrokebackforum.com/index.php?topic=12918.0"Meet The Creators"
In 2006, we were fortunate to have Larry McMurtry take part in our "Meet The Creators" profile series, long before I was involved with TDS. You can see that profile at the link below.
https://ultimatebrokebackforum.com/index.php?topic=15058.msg523318#msg523318Some memorable quotes from Larry McMurtry
If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.
Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.
A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.
Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It stops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can't be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all.
For the past several centuries the bonding power of the family dinner table has been one of the few constants, and now it's binding no more. The potency of the media is now stronger than that of the family. The wonder is that families still exist at all, since the forces of modern life mainly all pull people away from a family centered way of life.
It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.
People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about.
Nothing good ever comes without a price.
I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.
Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.
If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.
A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.
Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.
The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.
Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.
There isn't a thought in my head I care to be alone with for more than five minutes.
The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings -- crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few.
Contributors: CellarDweller115
The Daily Sheet is a production of The Ultimate Brokeback Forum at
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Today's edition by
CellarDweller115Editors emeritae: CactusGal, Marge_Innavera, tellyouwhat, Stilllearning, MissYouSoMuch, gnash
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