It’s a sad day for anyone west of the Mississippi.
Larry McMurtry, the great voice of western Americana, is dead of Parkinson’s disease at age 84.
A career novelist, screenwriter, critic, bookseller and book scout, McMurtry created Gus McRae, Duane Moore and Hud Hannon, outsized characters who leapt from his books to movie screens in the late 20th century.
His writing about women is especially prized and has been described as among the best by a contemporary male writer.
Films made from McMurtry’s stories were nominated for 34 Academy Awards and won 13. His output included 30 novels, 40 screenplays, and 14 books of non-fiction, all written on a manual typewriter.
Though he maintained that none of his books were “really great,” McMurtry won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1985 classic novel, “Lonesome Dove” and an Academy Award 30 years later for his screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain.”
Screenwriters working on “Lonesome Dove” threw up their hands and used McMurtry’s dialogue verbatim in the movie, pleading that none of them could write it any better. No less a writer than Norman Mailer said of McMurtry, “He’s too good. If I start reading him, I start writing like him.”
McMurtry’s stories are that captivating, his characters that rich, their dialogue that engrossing. A reader needn’t much imagination to know the people he writes about. It’s as though we met them in our lives years ago and he’s brought them back to us.
Ironically, McMurtry told Texas Monthly he turned to writing about the Old West to skewer what he saw as a false mythology only to find that he had created a new one. “Some things you cannot explain,” he said.
McMurtry grew up in tiny Archer City, Texas and his prose rings especially true for readers in small towns and empty places. His breakthrough novel, “The Last Picture Show,” fictionalized his hometown in a portrayal that included bestiality, pedophilia, closeted homosexuality, abuse, loneliness, broken dreams and despair.
Some town fathers in Archer City decried the novel, but when the movie garnered eight Academy Award nominations, a banner reading “Home of The Last Picture Show” was strung up over the town. Newsweek called the movie the best American film since “Citizen Kane.”
Anyone who appreciates crisp writing and a good tale knows where they were when they picked up a McMurtry novel.
I was in a Small Tracts Road cabin during Christmas break 1986 for “Lonesome Dove,” on a southbound jet a few years later for “Anything for Billy” and loitering in the Seattle Public Library in fall of 1983 when I opened “All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers.”
If you haven’t read “Lonesome Dove,” read it. If you have, maybe try “The Last Kind Words Saloon,” “Telegraph Days” or “Leaving Cheyenne.”
You won’t soon forget them.