REMEMBERING LARRY MCMURTRY

The life and times of the legendary Western writer and the legacy of Lonesome Dove.

- JOHNNY D. BOGGS

Texas author Larry McMurtry had a remarkable writing career that spanned six decades. He wrote fiction, nonfiction, memoir, television and film and was the rare writer to earn both a Pulitzer (Lonesome Dove) and an Oscar (Brokeback Mountain).- Photo by Diana Walker, 1978, True West Archives

“Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in town.”

Those were the first words I ever read written by Larry McMurtry, who died March 25 at age 84. They certainly weren’t the last.

In 1984, as a young reporter at the Dallas Times Herald (and a Texas transplant from South Carolina), McMurtry was required reading, so I devoured The Last Picture Show, Leaving Cheyenne and Horseman, Pass By—his first three novels—in my apartment. Back then, McMurtry was known for wearing a sweatshirt that identified him as a “Minor Regional Novelist.”

Regional? Yes. Minor? Debatable. Not many minor writers see their first three novels turned into motion pictures. But McMurtry was what Pat Conroy was to South Carolina, and what Max Evans and Tony Hillerman were to New Mexico. A regional writer who attracted readers outside his region. McMurtry wrote about the 20th-century West—sometimes putting contemporary cowboys in urban settings, as in Cadillac Jack (1982), about a bull-dogger turned antique scout in Washington, D.C. And often skipping cowboys altogether; Somebody’s Darling (1978) chronicled a woman director in Hollywood. In one interview, McMurtry said Western writers should give up the mythical frontier and focus on the modern West.

Ironically, when I read that quote, McMurtry had to have been writing what would become his masterpiece.