RIP Larry McMurtry

 

Larry McMurtry, a prolific novelist and screenwriter who demythologized the American West with his unromantic depictions of life on the 19th-century frontier and in contemporary small-town Texas, died on March 25, 2021 at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He was 84. Norn Larry Jeff McMurtry on June 3, 1936 in Archer City, Texas, U.S.A. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with his longtime collaborator Diana Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006. But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with “Lonesome Dove,” a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television mini-series. Larry was a producer and writer on the 2002 Euro-western TV film “Johnson County War” in 2002 starring Tom Berenger and Burt Reynolds.