Larry McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter and antiquarian bookseller, born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1936, whose fiction did more than almost any other to reimagine the myth of the American West.
Raised near the small town of Archer City - the model for the fictional Thalia that recurs throughout his work - he was educated at the University of North Texas and Rice University, and wrote across five decades. His early Texas novels, among them Horseman, Pass By (filmed as Hud) and The Last Picture Show, caught the passing of the old rural West, while Terms of Endearment turned to contemporary city lives.
His masterpiece is Lonesome Dove (1985), a vast, elegiac Western following two retired Texas Rangers on a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana; sprawling, funny and heartbreaking, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986 and has become a modern classic. Two decades later he returned to acclaim as a screenwriter, sharing the 2006 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with Diana Ossana for Brokeback Mountain.
A lifelong bookman, he ran the antiquarian shop Booked Up, latterly filling several buildings in Archer City with hundreds of thousands of volumes. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2014 and died in 2021, aged eighty-four.
