The Minor Regional

Novelist
When Larry McMurtry began writing,
he had no reason to believe that the
dusty plains and grim ranchers that
inspired him would capture anyone’s
attention. Thirty-two novels, a Pulitzer,
and an Oscar later, there’s no question
that the eighty-year-old author of
Lonesome Dove has done more to
shape the country’s understanding of
Texas than anyone before or since.
Photograph by LeAnn Mueller
When Larry McMurtry is not in Archer City, the one-
stoplight town in North Texas where he was raised, he
can often be found in Tucson, Arizona, in a single-story,
flat-roofed home in the immaculate neighborhood of
Oracle Foothills Estates. He was there one morning this
spring, standing at the glass-plated front door, dressed
in a white collared shirt, black athletic pants, and blue
New Balance athletic shoes. A red sweater he’d pulled
over his shirt sported a couple of holes. His hair, once
tousled and black, was now tousled and completely
white. His handshake was soft. “Well, here you are,” he
said matter-of-factly.
Behind him, six dogs—five small, one large—raced to the
entryway, a cacophonous committee of barking and
sniffing and frantic circles. “You will find this to be a
house of many creatures,” McMurtry said as he led me
down a short hallway toward a bedroom, where a large
black bunny sat in a hutch next to the bed, chewing
contentedly. “Behold, Diana’s rabbit,” he said. “Her
name is Beauty, because apparently Diana believes she
is beautiful.”
Beauty’s owner—also, incidentally, the owner of the six
dogs—is Diana Ossana, McMurtry’s longtime friend and
writing partner. The house, a cozy and cluttered home
full of books and photos, is hers too. McMurtry, who
turned eighty last month, has lived there off and on
since 1991; in 2011, after he married Faye Kesey, the
widow of novelist Ken Kesey, she moved in as well.
McMurtry turned around and shuffled us to the other
end of the hallway, to his and Faye’s bedroom. The room
held a queen-size bed, draped in a white comforter and
flanked on either side by bedside tables, on whose
surfaces sat vitamin bottles and medications. There was
also a sofa, a small desk with a computer for Faye, and a
large wooden table for McMurtry. On the table was a
stack of typing paper, some manila folders containing
manuscripts, a clock, a bottle of Advil, a box of tissues,
and McMurtry’s Hermes 3000 manual typewriter.
“Your bedroom is also your office?” I asked.
“It’s all I need,” he said, lowering himself slowly onto the
sofa.
“And obviously, there’s no truth to the rumors that
you’ve retired?” I asked, pointing to the manuscripts on
the table.
“Retire?” said McMurtry, and he shrugged. “Who
knows? I might have one more novel left in me.”
McMurtry’s manual typewriter, a Hermes 3000.
Photograph by LeAnn Mueller
For more than fifty years, he has been writing
novels—thirty in all, the plots ranging from Old West
adventures to small-town comedies to contemporary
domestic dramas. He has co-written two other novels
and published fourteen books of nonfiction—short
memoirs, collections of essays, a travel book, and even
biographies of such frontier figures as Crazy Horse—as
well as reams of book reviews and essays. He has written
or co-written more than forty teleplays and screenplays.
As if that were not enough, he has also found time to
carry on a fulfilling side profession as a “bookman,” as
he likes to call himself, traveling around the country to
hunt for rare books and overseeing a huge antiquarian
bookstore that he opened in Archer City in the eighties.
In American letters, he is something of an icon—winner
of both a Pulitzer Prize (for the novel Lonesome Dove,
about a cattle drive in the 1870s) and an Oscar (for the
screenplay to Brokeback Mountain, which he co-wrote
with Ossana, about two sexually conflicted modern-day
cowboys). His storytelling has been compared to that of
Charles Dickens and William Faulkner, and even the
famously self-absorbed novelist Norman Mailer—
himself a winner of two Pulitzers—once confessed his
admiration. “He’s too good,” he said, explaining his
resistance to McMurtry’s novels. “If I start reading him,
I start writing like him.”
Nowhere is that writing as fiercely cherished or as
deeply felt as in Texas, the setting for the majority of his
work, and which McMurtry has by turns elevated and
eviscerated with the kind of marrow-piercing
observations only ever allowed native sons. His fans in
Texas—and they are legion—treat him with the adulation
typically reserved for movie stars. In 2014, when he
appeared at the Dallas Museum of Art to promote his
latest best-seller, a western titled The Last Kind Words
Saloon, the 425-seat auditorium was filled to capacity,
and dozens more ticket holders were ushered into
overflow rooms to watch on simulcast. During a
question-and-answer segment, audience members took
turns commandeering the microphone to tell McMurtry
what his books had meant to them. One woman spoke of
her love of The Last Picture Show, his novel about
teenagers coming of age in the fictional North Texas
town of Thalia; another brought up Terms of
Endearment, his novel about an indomitable grande
dame in Houston’s wealthy River Oaks neighborhood. A
man confessed that he had read the 843-page Lonesome
Dove three times. And then another man rose to recall,
in almost reverential tones, how as a student at Texas
Christian University in the early sixties, he had played a
game of Ping-Pong against McMurtry, who was then
teaching at the school. The man had lost.
“Yes, I was quite good at Ping-Pong,” McMurtry replied,
and the audience roared with laughter, as if it was the
funniest thing anyone had ever heard.
I was raised just 25 miles from McMurtry’s hometown,
in the metropolis—at least relatively speaking—of
Wichita Falls. In the mid-seventies, when I was in high
school, I bought a paperback copy of The Last Picture
Show, turned to the first page, and started reading about
Sonny Crawford, a high school senior who plays football
for Thalia High, hangs out at a pool hall, drives a butane
gas truck for his boss, Fred Fartley, and obsesses about
having sex with girls in town, including his classmate
Charlene Duggs, who kisses him “convulsively, as if she
had just swallowed a golf ball and was trying to force it
back up” but who allows him to touch her breasts for
only a few minutes at a time.
I was mesmerized. I couldn’t believe that someone had
written a novel about teenagers just like ones I knew in
real life. Nor could I believe that such a book—set in the
same plains where I’d grown up, with a character named
Fred Fartley, of all things—was being praised as a
literary masterpiece. “A performance rarely equalled in
contemporary fiction,” read one critic’s quote on the
cover of the paperback. Although I had no earthly idea
then what good literature was, I knew I had stumbled
onto something. The prose was both dramatic and
slapstick funny, and the dialogue—pages and pages of
it—was curiously riveting in its plainspokenness. I read
almost all of it in one sitting.
I still own that paperback. It sits on a bookshelf in my
house—a reminder, in some ways, of all the stories there
are to tell, and that remain to be told, about Texas. No
one knows this better than McMurtry, of course, who
despite his age and prolific career continues to sit in
front of his Hermes 3000 at least a few days a week,
trying to knock out another chapter or scene.
In fact, when I looked closer at the manuscripts on his
desk, I realized that he was working on not one but two
novels. The first, which he had tentatively titled “Boss
Charlie,” was based on the life and times of the
nineteenth-century Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight;
the second, “Rich Girl,” was about the life and times of a
wealthy twenty-first-century woman who lives on a
ranch outside Fort Worth.
What’s more, McMurtry told me, he and Ossana were on
a deadline to complete a screenplay they had been
commissioned to write by producer-director Cary
Fukunaga; it was based on the true story of a man in
Oregon who decides to walk across the United States
after his fifteen-year-old son, bullied for being gay,
hangs himself.
Surely, I said, taking a seat next to the sofa, such a
workload must take its toll on a man who has just turned
eighty.
“Well, my fingers aren’t as nimble as they once were, so I
have trouble changing my typewriter ribbon,” McMurtry
replied. “And there are days my vision gets so blurry that
I can’t always see what I’ve typed. There are other days
when my energy lags.”
He shrugged again. “But no, I’m not ready to quit. Not
yet.”
Just then, Ossana, an attractive woman in her sixties
with thick blond hair, walked in. She had been doing
some work at the other end of the house. She gave me a
cheerful grin. “Larry is like an old cowboy who has to get
up in the morning and do some chores,” she said. “He
has to get up and write. I don’t think he would know
what to do with himself if he didn’t have something to
write.”
McMurtry on a walk in Tucson, where he lives part-time.
Photograph by LeAnn Mueller
Spend any time with McMurtry, and it doesn’t take
long to be struck—no, run over—by his restless, roving
intellect. During my time with him, he talked about the
personal lives of European leaders during World War I,
a Siberian leper colony, the 2016 presidential campaign,
concussions among professional football players, an
afternoon he spent playing tennis with Barbra Streisand
in Hollywood, the problems with air travel, his love of Dr
Pepper and Fritos, the geoglyphs that can be found in
the Atacama Desert of Chile, and a rodeo performer he
once knew whose boot was ripped off during a bull ride,
then sent flying through the air until it clobbered a
spectator sitting in the bleachers.
“I’ll never forget one night, when my whole family was
here for dinner, Larry started talking about early-
twentieth-century authors and he ended up talking
about women and inverted nipples,” Ossana told me.
“We just sat there, our mouths open, wondering how his
brain works.”
But ask McMurtry about his writing—why he became a
writer in the first place, or what inspires him, or if
there’s an underlying meaning to his fiction, or any
other such forced attempt at introspection—and he is
steadfastly unreflective. “I like making stuff up,” he told
me, simply.
When I tried again—What about process? Did he ever
get stuck developing a plot? Seize up sometimes before a
blank page?—he sighed. “I just write,” he replied. “You
either do it, or you don’t.”
Nor does he have any particular desire to discuss the
characters he has created or the books he has written.
“As soon as I finish a novel and ship it to the publisher,”
he told me, “I almost immediately lose interest in it and
never read it again.”
“Even Lonesome Dove?” I asked.
“I’ve never reread it. I don’t hang on to any of my books.
If I did that, I wouldn’t have time to think about what
I’m going to do next.”
I looked at him for a few seconds to see if he was joking.
He looked right back at me, his face impassive.
That his voracious curiosity, and his ability to spin
yarns, were forged on the empty flatlands of rural Texas
makes either no sense at all or all the sense in the world.
He spent his early childhood on a small ranch fifteen
miles outside Archer City, where his father had him
riding a horse by the age of three and herding cattle at
four. McMurtry told me there were no books in the
house—not a single one—until a cousin heading off to
World War II dropped off nineteen boys’ adventure
books with such titles as Sergeant Silk: The Prairie
Scout. His parents did not read to him. “They preferred
sitting on the porch, swapping tales with other relatives,
or we listened to the radio,” he said.
When McMurtry was six, his father moved the family to
a white frame home in Archer City (population: 1,675) so
that McMurtry could be close to school. Scrawny and
bespectacled, McMurtry was a good student. (“Keep in
mind,” he cautioned, “that a good student in Archer City
was any student who actually attended class.”) When he
got to high school, he joined the 4-H club, played the
clarinet (and later trombone) in the marching band,
acted in school plays, wrote what he called “one-
paragraph editorials” for the school newspaper, ran the
mile for the track team, and was a starter on the school’s
dreadful basketball team, which had the distinction, he
recalled, of losing one game, to Crowell High School, by
a score of 106–4.
McMurtry as a boy on his family’s ranch, sitting on his first pony.
Photograph courtesy of Larry McMurtry
His greatest extracurricular interest, however, was
books—the very thing he hadn’t had access to on the
ranch. After devouring his cousin’s adventure series, he
bought pulp novels from the paperback rack at Archer
City’s drugstore. When he was in Fort Worth one
weekend for a track meet, he took a city bus downtown
just so he could wander through Barber’s Book Store. He
read Don Quixote and Madame Bovary. He even leafed
through the Bhagavad Gita. “Anything I could get my
hands on, I’d read,” he said. “Reading took me away, at
least for a little while, from the drabness of Archer City.”
McMurtry’s father, realizing his son had no aptitude for
ranch work, hoped that he would enroll at Texas A&M
and become a veterinarian. But after watching a
television program about the Rice Institute (now Rice
University), which then provided free tuition, McMurtry
applied, was accepted, and soon was off to Houston.
Upon receiving a score of 2 on his first calculus exam,
however, he realized that he would never pass any of
Rice’s math courses, and he eventually transferred to
North Texas State College (now the University of North
Texas), in Denton, just under two hours’ drive from
Archer City. There, he took a creative-writing class and
composed poems and short stories, including two about
Texas ranchers that he decided to combine and turn into
a novel.
“So even back then you dreamed about becoming a
novelist?” I asked, remembering how, when I got to
college, I’d decided to be a writer just like him and
produce my own novel about a boy growing up in Texas.
(I never made it past the second chapter.)
“No,” McMurtry said. “I wrote only to fulfill the
requirements of my class. If there had been something
more exciting to do, I would have done that.”
After graduating, in 1958, he married Jo Ballard, who
had studied English at Texas Woman’s University, in
Denton. He returned to Rice to study for a master’s
degree in English—no math required—and planned to
pursue a Ph.D. and spend the rest of his life teaching.
But he kept working on the novel, banging out five
double-spaced pages on his manual typewriter every
morning, just after breakfast.
“So you were consumed with some mystical urge to
write,” I said hopefully. McMurtry shook his head. “It
was only an urge to finish what I had started,” he said. “I
wanted the book done so I could move on with my life.”
Still, based on the first draft, he was awarded a
fellowship to attend Stanford University’s prestigious
creative-writing program. His class was filled with other
aspiring authors, such as Robert Stone, Tillie Olsen,
Ernest Gaines, and Ken Kesey (who was married to his
high school sweetheart, Faye). If there was an unspoken
pressure to write the next great American novel—Kesey,
for one, would soon go on to publish the wildly popular
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—McMurtry didn’t feel
it. “I saw no conflict about writing about ranch life,” he
told me evenly. “I thought it was a perfectly suitable
topic for exploration.”
The ranch house where McMurtry spent his earliest years.
Photograph by LeAnn Mueller
The novel, Horseman, Pass By, whose title comes
from a poem by W. B. Yeats—was published by Harper in
1961, after the Stanford fellowship had ended and
McMurtry had moved to Fort Worth, where he got a job
teaching English at TCU (and yes, played Ping-Pong).
Set in the fifties, the book tells the story of a noble but
financially struggling North Texas rancher named
Homer Bannon; his coarse, unscrupulous stepson, Hud;
and his earnest teenage grandson, Lonnie. The book
opens with a lovely description of the Texas plains in
April “after the mesquite leafed out.” In a subsequent
chapter, Lonnie describes a horseback ride across the
high country with his grandfather. “There below us was
Texas, green and brown and graying in the sun, spread
wide under the clear spread of sky like the opening scene
in a big western movie.”
At the same time, the novel is starkly unsentimental
about rural life as the golden age of ranching is coming
to an end. A state veterinarian orders Homer to destroy
his herd of cattle over fear of hoof-and-mouth disease;
among the cattle he must kill are two old Longhorn
steers he loves. (“I been keeping ’em to remind me how
times was,” says Homer.) Hud is a restless, violent man
who sexually assaults the family’s cook. Driving home
one night from a rodeo, Hud accidentally hits Homer,
who is crawling, senile, on the side of the road, and Hud
decides to put the old man out of his misery with a .22
rifle. At the end of the novel, a disillusioned Lonnie
climbs into a cattle truck and heads toward the lights of
Wichita Falls.
McMurtry told me he expected Horseman, Pass By to
sell “maybe a handful of copies and disappear,” and, in
fact, the novel was hardly a best-seller. But shortly after
it was published, New York Times critic Charles Poore
declared McMurtry, then just 25 years old, to be “among
the most promising first novelists who have appeared
this year.” Impressed in particular with McMurtry’s
descriptions of the “gnarled pastoral side to Texas life,”
Poore hailed him for offering a new understanding of
Texas. “The material he has at his command as a
descendant of Texan generations is usable in all kinds of
new ways. We say that, obviously, in view of the narrow
range in which [Texas] has been exploited so far in our
literature. Mostly boots and saddles, or oil rigs and
billionaires.”
The rights to Horseman, Pass By were snapped up by a
Hollywood producer, who turned it into the movie Hud,
a kind of revisionist western starring Paul Newman.
Released in 1963, Hud was a critical and commercial
success, nominated for seven Academy Awards and
winning three. In the meantime, Harper published
McMurtry’s second novel, Leaving Cheyenne, which
follows the lives of three more rural North Texans
through the first half of the twentieth century: the
serious Gid Fry, who is being groomed by his father to
take over the family ranch; Gid’s best friend, Johnny
McCloud, a free-spirited cowboy; and their neighbor
Molly Taylor, who loves both Gid and Johnny and bears
them each a son. (In one scene, Gid’s father tells him
that “a woman’s love is like the morning dew, it’s just as
apt to settle on a horse turd as it is on a rose.”)
Again, critics were impressed. “If Chaucer were a Texan
writing today, and only 27 years old, this is how he
would have written and this is how he would have felt,”
wrote Marshall Sprague in the New York Times. “The
book’s comedy is rare, the tragedy heart-rending—and,
over all, there is an atmosphere of serenity and wisdom.”
Though McMurtry was not yet convinced he could make
a living as a writer—he continued to supplement his
income by teaching, moving from TCU to Rice—he
decided to write one more novel, and in 1966 he
published The Last Picture Show, which he based
largely on Archer City and the people he knew growing
up. Although Sonny doesn’t bed Charlene, he does begin
an affair with the football coach’s good-hearted wife,
while his best friend, Duane Moore, goes after the
prettiest girl in town, Jacy Farrow, only to be dumped
and then drafted to fight in Korea. Adding to the sense
of quiet desperation, the lone movie theater in town
shuts down.
McMurtry’s own mother, after reading one hundred
pages, hid the book in a closet because of the profane
language and sex scenes, including one in which teenage
boys perform rather unnatural acts with a cow. A few
Archer City residents were furious with McMurtry for
portraying their town as dreary and desolate. But critics
remained fascinated with the young writer’s ability: one
compared the characters in The Last Picture Show to
the frustrated small-town cast in Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio. Hollywood again came calling, and
McMurtry sold the book’s film rights to Columbia
Pictures, which also paid him to co-write the screenplay
with Peter Bogdanovich, a promising filmmaker who
would direct the movie. Bogdanovich hired relatively
unknown actors—Randy Quaid, Timothy Bottoms, Jeff
Bridges—to play the teenagers, as well as the model
Cybill Shepherd, who had never appeared in a movie; for
the adult roles, he hired veterans Cloris Leachman, Ben
Johnson, Ellen Burstyn, and Eileen Brennan.
McMurtry showed up in Archer City for a couple of
afternoons to watch the filming. By this time, he and Jo
had divorced—they had one son, James, who would
grow up to become a respected singer-songwriter—and
he arrived in his hometown alone. Everyone on set was
riveted by him. “He wore these Buddy Holly–like
glasses, and he was so smart,” recalled Shepherd when I
called her recently in California. “And he possessed this
quiet charm. One day when it was cold, he got in the car
I was sitting in and held my hands to keep them warm.
He told me about the poetry of Yeats. I had never met
anyone like him.”
A view of one of the many floor-to-ceiling bookcases at his home in Archer
City.
Photograph by LeAnn Mueller
When The Last Picture Show was released, in
1971, it was a sensation, receiving eight Academy Award
nominations, including best picture, best director, and
best adapted screenplay. (It received two Oscars:
Leachman won for best supporting actress and Johnson
won for best supporting actor.) Jack Kroll, Newsweek’s
veteran film critic, went so far as to proclaim The Last
Picture Show the best American movie since Citizen
Kane.
That his books translated so well to the screen would,
over the next several decades, propel McMurtry to the
kind of stratospheric fame he could have never
envisioned for himself as a writer. By this time he had
moved to Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., where
he and a friend, Marcia Carter, the daughter of an
oilman and diplomat, opened a rare-book store in
Georgetown. McMurtry was hired by producers to write
screenplays, including one based on John Barth’s
philosophical novel The Floating Opera and another
based on Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas. (They were never produced.)
Meanwhile, he churned out more novels, this time with a
distinctly urban backdrop: Moving On, published in
1970, features a sharp-tongued 25-year-old married
woman in Houston named Patsy Carpenter who has a
taste for extramarital affairs; All My Friends Are Going
to Be Strangers, published in 1972, details the
adventures of Danny Deck, a young writer at Rice who
has just learned his novel has been accepted for
publication. And then came 1975’s Terms of
Endearment, a novel of domestic manners whose
protagonist, Aurora Greenway, makes dramatic
pronouncements (“The success of a marriage invariably
depends on the woman”), juggles a bevy of suitors
(among them, a wealthy oilman who lives in a Lincoln
Continental that’s parked on the twenty-fourth floor of a
parking garage he owns in downtown Houston), and
takes care of her daughter, Emma, who over the last
sixty pages of the book dies of cancer.
McMurtry’s seemingly effortless shift—from rural to
citified, from ranchers to socialites—was met with
immediate praise. If before his work had caught
attention for its unsparing portrayal of the state’s
agrarian identity, now he was lauded for so easily
embracing Texas’s emerging modernity. The New York
Times critic Janet Maslin was so impressed at his ability
to capture the inner lives of women in Terms of
Endearment that she would later seek to credit him as
the father of chick lit.
Needless to say, Hollywood pounced again, and the
movie Terms of Endearment—this one featuring Shirley
MacLaine, Debra Winger, and Jack Nicholson—became
a blockbuster hit in 1983, receiving eleven Academy
Award nominations and winning five. At least one
actress contacted McMurtry to meet for lunch or drinks,
hoping to persuade him to write a novel that could be
turned into a movie starring her. Rumors abounded that
he carried on flings with a few starlets; one story went
that he had even been caught kissing one in a
convertible on Sunset Boulevard.
“Not true,” he told me.
“Is the rumor true you ended up having a brief romance
with Cybill Shepherd?” I asked.
“That’s a little true,” he replied, smiling ever so slightly. I
smiled too. It was nice to know that, on occasion, the
scrawny small-town boy with thick glasses can get the
prettiest girl.
If McMurtry was impressed by all the attention,
however, he didn’t show it. As a joke—or maybe it wasn’t
a joke—he sometimes wore a sweatshirt imprinted with
the words “Minor Regional Novelist.” “I was a minor
regional novelist from Texas,” he told me. “That’s all I
was.”
In fact, over the next few years, he did try to expand his
fictional territory. After Terms of Endearment, he wrote
Somebody’s Darling, about a female director in
Hollywood on the verge of great fame; Cadillac Jack,
which follows a rodeo bulldogger turned antiques
collector as he womanizes his way across the country,
eventually ending up in Washington, D.C.; and The
Desert Rose, which chronicles the life of an aging dancer
in Las Vegas.
He also attempted to distance himself from other Texas
writers, including the great J. Frank Dobie, skewering
them publicly for ignoring the realities of an evolving
state, with its rapidly sprawling suburbs, in favor of
nostalgic historical novels. In an essay published in the
Texas Observer in 1981, McMurtry lambasted these Old
West novels for being nothing more than “Country-and-
Western literature,” overly romanticized stories about
honorable cowboys and the joys of the open range.
Still, he could not escape the state’s own hold on him:
even in the narratives set outside Texas, his characters
often had to contend with the state in one way or
another. In one comic scene in Somebody’s Darling, two
screenwriters, Elmo Buckle and Winfield Gohagen, steal
the director’s master print in hopes of secreting it away
to Texas. “Texas is the ultimate last resort,” says
Gohagen. “It’s always a good idea to go to Texas, if you
can’t think of anything else to do.”
And then McMurtry himself chose to go to Texas in a
way no one could have expected. He began writing an
old-fashioned western about a cattle drive.
Based on his extensive reading of western history,
as well as on the stories he had heard his relatives tell on
the front porch, McMurtry saw the Old West not as a
romantic frontier but as a shatteringly lonely and often
barbaric place, where few people found any happiness at
all. Now McMurtry set out to prove this, opening his
novel with two retired, hard-bitten Texas Rangers in the
forlorn border town of Lonesome Dove.
The ex-Rangers, Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow
Call, lead a cattle drive to Montana with a ragtag team of
cowpokes, which includes a black cowboy, a bandit
turned cook, a piano player with a hole in his stomach, a
young widow, a teenager who is Call’s unacknowledged
son, and a prostitute. On their journey, the group
encounters psychopathic outlaws, vengeful Indians,
buffalo hunters, gamblers, scouts, cavalry officers, and
backwoodsmen. They endure perilous river crossings,
thunderstorms, sandstorms, hailstorms, windstorms,
lightning storms, grasshopper storms, stampedes,
drought, and a mean bear. There are plenty of shootings
and a few impromptu hangings. The prostitute, Lorena,
is gang-raped. In the end, after McCrae is mortally
wounded by Indians, he asks Call to bury him in a little
peach orchard by the Guadalupe River near San
Antonio, where he was once in love with a woman. Call
dutifully carries his partner’s half-mummified body back
to Texas.
McMurtry told me he was offered “maybe a ten-
thousand-dollar advance” for Lonesome Dove, because
his editor was not sure readers would want to buy a
western the size of War and Peace. (McMurtry accepted
the advance because he wasn’t sure people would want
to buy it either.) But when Lonesome Dove was released,
in 1985, it grabbed hold of the public’s imagination like
no western of its time, selling nearly 300,000 copies in
hardcover and more than a million copies in paperback.
Readers raved over McMurtry’s precisely drawn
characters, his depictions of place, his ear for frontier
idioms, and his action-packed set pieces. They
memorized lines of dialogue (“The older the violin, the
sweeter the music”; “Ride with an outlaw, die with him”;
Call’s unforgettable declaration after beating a surly
Army scout to a pulp in front of shocked onlookers: “I
hate rude behavior in a man. I won’t tolerate it”). And
they reveled in the details, whether about food eaten on
the cattle drive (beans laced with chopped rattlesnake)
or, say, medical treatment (a cowboy bitten by an angry
horse is given axle grease and turpentine for his wound).
For Texans, went one joke, Lonesome Dove had become
the third-most-important book in publishing history,
right behind the Bible and the Warren Commission
report.
The book was awarded the Pulitzer the following year,
and when it was inevitably adapted for the screen—CBS
aired a four-part miniseries based on the novel in 1989,
starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall—a
staggering 26 million viewers tuned in. Together, the
novel and miniseries were arguably more influential in
shaping Americans’ vision of the Old West than the
movies of John Ford.
When I asked McMurtry about Lonesome Dove’s
success, he did one of his shrugs. “It isn’t a masterpiece
by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “All I had
wanted to do was write a novel that demythologized the
West. Instead, it became the chief source of western
mythology. Some things you cannot explain.”
McMurtry’s fame grew all the more: Annie Leibovitz
took his photograph; universities invited him to lecture.
“There were at least five men around the country who
pretended to be me so that they could seduce women,”
he said. “One woman called and said, “Don’t you
remember who I am? I slept with you on Thanksgiving
Day.’ I said, ‘No, ma’am, I was with my family on
Thanksgiving Day.’ ”
Protective of his privacy, he embraced a peripatetic life,
driving rented Lincoln Continentals around the country,
visiting friends and secondhand bookstores. In addition
to an apartment he kept above his bookshop in
Georgetown, he had apartments in Los Angeles and
Houston. He also purchased a two-story, prairie-style
mansion for himself in Archer City, and, hoping to
create an American version of Hay-on-Wye, the Welsh
town that draws book lovers from all over the world, he
opened an enormous used-book store in his hometown.
Spread over four buildings downtown, it consisted
mostly of the inventories he bought from other
secondhand booksellers who wanted to get out of the
business.
For Archer City residents, the resentment they had felt
toward McMurtry over The Last Picture Show was long
gone. One woman opened the Lonesome Dove Inn. The
owner of the Dairy Queen taped the covers of
McMurtry’s novels to the wall. When the New York
author Susan Sontag came to Archer City, she looked
around and told McMurtry that he lived in his own
theme park.
I asked McMurtry again if it was really true that he
hadn’t reread the novel. “I haven’t reread it, and
incidentally, I’ve only watched parts of the miniseries,”
he replied. “I’ve got other things to do.”
What he did was continue to write—relentlessly,
pounding out his five pages daily on the Hermes 3000,
which he took with him everywhere. (McMurtry, who
despises computers, eventually purchased more than
two dozen Hermes typewriters, which he kept in places
around the country.) He seemed to issue forth a book
every year or so, sometimes twice a year. He wrote
another Old West novel (Anything for Billy, about Billy
the Kid). He wrote Texasville, a sequel to The Last
Picture Show, in which Sonny and Duane are middle-
aged and still living in Thalia, and he also wrote The
Evening Star, a sequel to Terms of Endearment, in
which Aurora reads Proust and realizes her life is
slipping away. He wrote more screenplays and
composed book reviews and literary essays for such
publications as the New York Review of Books.
When I asked McMurtry’s close friend Susan
Freudenheim, a former Fort Worth museum curator
who is now the executive editor of the Jewish Journal,
in Los Angeles, how McMurtry was able to do so many
things at the same time, she sighed. “There’s no way to
explain it,” she said. “He operates on a different plane
than everyone else. One day, Larry and I were out
somewhere, and he said he had to take me back to my
apartment because he had to write a long book review
for the Times. He said he would be done in an hour. I
thought, ‘Impossible.’ But one hour later, there he was,
back at my door, his review typed up and ready to send.”
One would think that if there was anyone who did not
need a writing partner, it would be McMurtry. But in the
late eighties, on a visit to Tucson, he met Diana Ossana,
who was then a legal assistant and the mother of an
eleven-year-old daughter. (The two happened to be
dining at the same all-you-can-eat catfish restaurant.)
They became very close friends—neither would describe
their relationship to me as romantic—and in 1991, when
McMurtry underwent quadruple-bypass surgery after
suffering a heart attack, she told him he was welcome to
stay in her back bedroom and recuperate at her home.
He arrived with a typewriter and some books—among
them, his twelve-volume edition of Proust and the
diaries of Virginia Woolf. Sitting at Ossana’s kitchen
counter, he quickly crafted Streets of Laredo, a sequel to
Lonesome Dove, in which Call, as an old man, is hired by
a railroad to chase a Mexican bandit. But afterward,
McMurtry began to experience some post-surgical
depression, sitting on the couch and staring out the
window for hours. Ossana intervened. “I realized that if
he didn’t write his five pages a day, he would die,” she
told me. “So I basically forced him to go back to work.”
An unpublished author who had written a few short
stories, Ossana occasionally made comments about
McMurtry’s manuscripts. She sometimes rearranged
passages and suggested plot twists. “She was very good,
and I was very grateful,” said McMurtry. In fact, when a
producer called and asked for a screenplay based on the
life of Pretty Boy Floyd, the Depression-era gangster,
McMurtry said he would do it only if Ossana could be his
co-writer. The two wrote the script, then turned it into a
novel when the film was not produced. Once McMurtry
finished a prequel to Lonesome Dove (Dead Man’s
Walk), they also co-wrote another novel, a western titled
Zeke and Ned, as well as a couple of teleplays and
screenplays, including, hilariously enough, a film
adaptation of the fifties television series Father Knows
Best. (It was never made.)
Then, in 1997, Ossana handed McMurtry a short story in
The New Yorker that had been written by Annie Proulx,
titled “Brokeback Mountain,” about Ennis del Mar and
Jack Twist, two ranch hands who fall in love in
Wyoming as teenagers in 1963 and continue their
tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years.
Envious that he hadn’t thought of the story first,
McMurtry—who had known gay cowboys growing up—
embraced the idea of bringing the narrative to the
screen. He and Ossana secured the rights to the story
from Proulx, wrote a script, and waited to see if the
movie would be made.
While they waited, McMurtry knocked out some more
books: another Lonesome Dove prequel (Comanche
Moon), a series of four novels about a British family who
travels through the American frontier in the 1830s, and
Duane’s Depressed, in which the former football-playing
teenager from Thalia is now an oil millionaire and so
bored with his life that he stops driving his pickup truck,
begins walking everywhere instead, falls in love with his
lesbian psychiatrist, and eventually flies to Egypt to see
the pyramids.
McMurtry even wrote an odd book of history titled Oh
What a Slaughter! Massacres in the American West:
1846–1890. When I asked him why he took on such a
subject in the midst of everything else, he said, simply,
“The massacres interested me.”
“Did you ever consider slowing down, at least a little?
Take some sort of break from writing to restore your
creative batteries?” I asked.
McMurtry gave me one of his stares. “Writing is what I
do,” he said.
McMurtry had no expectation that Brokeback Mountain
would ever be produced; a gay-cowboy movie was not
exactly on the wish lists of Hollywood studio executives.
But then famed director Ang Lee jumped onboard, as
did stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, and when
the film was released, in 2005, it provoked an
unprecedented national conversation about sexuality,
machismo, and the power of story. The movie earned
eight Academy Award nominations, including for best
picture. (It won three: for best director, best adapted
screenplay, and best original score.) Just as McMurtry
had strived to do in his novels, Brokeback Mountain
took a familiar genre—cowboy life—and shattered it.
At the Academy Awards ceremony, which he attended
with Ossana, McMurtry wore blue jeans with a tuxedo
shirt and an Armani tuxedo jacket, a sartorial choice
that got him almost as much media attention as the A-
list actresses in their designer gowns. “I wanted to be
comfortable, because going to the Oscars is like sitting
all day in a gymnasium,” he told me. “Anything to make
it less onerous, I will do.”
In his late sixties, standing on the red carpet with Ossana at the 2006
Academy Awards.
Photograph by K Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images
It might have seemed a perfect time to retire at the
top, or at least scale back. McMurtry was 69, and as he
himself had suggested in his 1999 collection of essays,
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, most fiction
writers in their sixties lose their touch. “Self-repetition,
if not self-parody, are the traps that await elderly
novelists,” he wrote.
In fact, some critics were already accusing McMurtry of
parodying himself in his Lonesome Dove sequel and
prequels. (“It turns out the person who can write the
best parody of Larry McMurtry is Larry McMurtry,”
wrote one.) The New York Times’ Dwight Garner
panned him for writing too many books. “He writes so
much that supply outstrips demand,” he snapped. “A lot
of his stuff verges on being—how to put this?—typed
rather than written.”
McMurtry ignored the criticism. “I’ve never written to
please other people,” he told me. In the years following
his Oscar, he published three short memoirs (about his
life as a writer, his life as a book collector, and his life in
the film business), a short biography of General George
Armstrong Custer, and two more novels (When the Light
Goes and Rhino Ranch) featuring Duane Moore, who
still lives in Thalia, suffering from clogged arteries
because of eating too many butter-basted T-bones at a
steakhouse in nearby Seymour. Duane, who is often said
to be McMurtry’s alter ego, tries to find love with a
variety of women, ponders all the hits and misses of his
life, and finally keels over dead, alone, while laying a
trotline.
Then, in early 2011, McMurtry pulled a Duane-like
move. He picked up the phone and called Faye Kesey,
who lived on a farm in Oregon and who had not
remarried since Ken’s death, in 2001. McMurtry, who
told me he had always maintained “a curiosity” about
Faye since meeting her during their Stanford days,
arranged for Faye to fly to Texas and come to Archer
City. “I had wanted to see his bookstore,” explained
Faye, who today is a spry and very pretty 81-year-old
with blue eyes and shoulder-length gray hair. “And I
could tell Larry wanted some company. He seemed a
little lonely.”
The visit quickly turned romantic. McMurtry bought a
ring from a jewelry store in Wichita Falls, and in April
they were married in Archer City by a justice of the
peace before members of their families and a small
group of McMurtry’s friends, including Ossana,
Freudenheim, his former bookstore partner Marcia
Carter, and the actress Diane Keaton, who has long
wanted to turn Somebody’s Darling into a movie. (Cybill
Shepherd couldn’t make it.) In his wedding vows,
McMurtry told Faye, “I promise I will always be
interesting.”
“And has he been?” I asked Faye.
“Oh, very interesting,” she said, smiling, her eyes radiant
behind her glasses. “I have to say, you don’t find many
people like Larry.”
Soon after the wedding, McMurtry was back to writing
fiction, and in 2014 he published The Last Kind Words
Saloon, a spare novel that follows the Old West icons
Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday from a saloon in the Texas
settlement of Long Grass to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
show in Denver to the climactic gunfight at the OK
Corral, in Tombstone, Arizona. The book made best-
seller lists. In the New York Review of Books, Joyce
Carol Oates gushed, “It’s as if Vladimir and Estragon of
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot have been transformed into
two aging gunslingers trading wisecracks and platitudes
in an existentially barren western landscape, waiting for
a redemption that never comes.”
Just as he had ignored the criticism, McMurtry ignored
the praise. “Oh, the book was fine,” he said when I
mentioned Oates’s review. “It could have been better.” I
asked if he still agreed with his assessment in one of his
memoirs, Literary Life, in which he’d declared that none
of his work was “really great.” He nodded. “Maybe a
couple of books will last,” he said. “But the rest will end
up on back shelves of bookshops. There could be worse
fates.”
Was he right? Perhaps, I thought, it was true that the
next generation of readers, an increasingly diverse swath
of globalized and digitized consumers, would know little
of McMurtry or his work. But it was also true—and I
knew this as a reader myself—that McMurtry had
forever shaped the way people see Texas, with all of its
past, all of its stories, all of its changes. As Mark Busby, a
professor of English at Texas State University and a
leading McMurtry scholar, told me, “What no one can
deny is that McMurtry has made Texas feel very real. His
books have taught people that Texas is not just a curious
part of the country but an unforgettable piece of the
American experience.” He continued, “Think about it.
Parents are still naming their boys Gus or Call. I named
my own dog Hud.”
McMurtry with his wife, Faye Kesey (left), and writing partner Ossana, as well
as the six dogs with whom they share a home in Tucson.
Photograph by LeAnn Mueller
Several weeks after my trip to Tucson, I went to see
McMurtry in Archer City, where he and Faye were
spending a few days. Except for a couple of new
businesses, the town looks almost exactly as it did when
he was a boy: dry and dusty, the sole stoplight still
blinking, the movie theater shuttered. McMurtry’s
house, which was once the country club, sits a few blocks
from downtown.
The house, which has floor-to-ceiling bookcases in
almost every one of its fourteen rooms, the shelves filled
with McMurtry’s favorite books—28,000 in all—has the
air of an invitation-only private library. As Faye
cheerfully put dishes away in the kitchen, McMurtry
gave me a tour, pointing out some of his prized
collections: novels written by Russians, novels written
by poets, novels written about the Yellow Peril, travel
books written in the nineteenth century by women. He
stopped to show me a 1929 edition of Nathanael West’s
novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, which he had found after a
25-year search. “It cost me six thousand dollars,” he
said. “Now you know the real reason I keep writing.”
He put the book back on its shelf, then led the way to the
dining room, where one of his Hermes 3000s sat on the
table. There was a slight wobble in his walk. McMurtry,
ever more frail, is slowing down: his balance, he told me,
is not good, and he has had to stop driving because of his
weakening eyesight. He takes blood-pressure and blood-
thinner medications for his heart; he has trouble going
up and down stairs. Last fall, when he received a
National Humanities Medal from President Obama at a
White House ceremony, he wore his New Balances
instead of his favorite cowboy boots because he was
worried he might slip and fall on the marble floors. “Old
age comes on apace to ravage all the clime,” he said,
quoting the eighteenth-century Scottish poet James
Beattie. I asked him if he planned to be buried in Archer
City some day. “No, I think I’ll go for cremation,” he
said, matter-of-fact as usual. “I’ll have my ashes kept in
the bookstore. That seems appropriate.”
We soon headed to the bookstore—Faye driving
McMurtry, me following in my car. The store now takes
up only two buildings; in 2012 McMurtry held a large
book auction, selling off nearly three-fourths of his
inventory to make it more manageable. Inside, there
were only a couple of customers. “Our business these
days is largely online,” he said as we strolled the aisles.
“It’s sad to say, but the era when one wandered through
an old bookshop is almost gone forever.”
McMurtry had one more thing to show me. We got back
in our cars, and I followed as Faye drove to the little
ranch outside town where McMurtry spent his early
childhood. As we turned off the highway and onto a dirt
road, I was struck by how much the plains around us
looked like those McMurtry described 55 years ago in
Horseman, Pass By. The mesquite had begun to leaf out,
and new grass was carpeting the flats. As we crested a
hill, the ranch country spread wide under the clear
spread of sky like the opening scene in a big western
movie.
We pulled up to the ranch house. Not far away, on
another property, was a giant wind turbine, its blades
slowly turning. McMurtry haltingly made his way across
the small front yard, holding onto Faye’s arm as he
stepped onto the stone porch. He opened the door, and
as we walked inside, I took a breath. Each room, even
the kitchen, was filled with books, neatly arranged in
customized bookshelves that McMurtry had added to
the house. “I thought you would like this, to see all the
books in my once-bookless home,” McMurtry said.
A few minutes later, he seemed ready to return to Archer
City. It was apparently time to get back to the Hermes
3000. There were, after all, two new novels to work on
and a screenplay to write.
We stepped back out on the porch, and he took another
look around, his gaze turning south. In the distance
stood the Cross Timbers, a belt of trees that marks the
lower border of the Great Plains in Texas.
“You know, people have no idea how empty the world is
out here,” McMurtry said. “They don’t understand its
bleakness.”
“And yet you keep coming back,” I said.
“I keep coming back,” he replied. A light breeze came up,
blowing wisps of his white hair across his forehead. “I
admit, I always do.”