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In a full and sweeping writing career, Larry McMurtry wrote essays, novels and Academy Award-winning screenplays. However, his love for books went beyond writing. While living in Washington, D.C., he established a bookstore called Booked Up in 1971. Seventeen years later, a second Booked Up store opened in Archer City, Texas. It became one of the largest bookstores in the United States with an inventory between 400,000 and 450,000 books. By 2012, McMurtry decided it was time to downsize the business, and an auction was conducted, drawing book lovers, dealers and curious onlookers. "I've never seen that many people lined up in Archer City, and I'm sure I never will again,” McMurtry observed to a New York Times reporter.
McMurtry wrote about the modern and historical west. In several ways his writing changed how both fiction and nonfiction writers treated western folklore. He brought the modern west into the 20th century. His characters were not just cowboys --- they were real people living in a contemporary and changing western culture.
LONESOME DOVE was the epic story of retired Texas Rangers driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana in the waning days of the American West. This novel of death, aging, love and friendship stretched 864 pages, and I recall approaching the conclusion hoping it would never end. It won McMurtry the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was turned into a four-part television miniseries that received 18 Emmy nominations and won seven. McMurtry would write several other novels in the Lonesome Dove series, including prequels and sequels. His portrayal of the Texas Rangers as an organization showed them as real men and not the supermen of Texas legend. As modern historians have dug deeper into the Ranger myth, McMurtry’s observations on the cowboy legend has served as important guidance. “I’m a critic of the myth of the cowboy,” he told an interviewer in 1988. “I don’t feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it.’’
Several of McMurtry’s novels were transformed into iconic movies. HORSEMAN, PASS BY, published in 1961, became the 1963 film Hud, starring Paul Newman and Patricia Neal. It was nominated for several Academy Awards and won Neal an Oscar for Best Actress. 1966 saw the publication of THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, a semi-autobiographical story of McMurtry’s youth in Archer City. The movie, released in 1971, was selected for recognition by the National Film Registry as culturally and historically significant. TERMS OF ENDEARMENT, a 1983 adaptation of McMurtry’s 1975 novel, won five Oscars, including Best Picture. It was a modern western story of a Houston family with deep ties to 20th-century Texas. In total, movies adapted from McMurtry’s works won 13 Oscars, including one with cowriter Diana Ossana for Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx’s short story of the same name, in 2006.
As previously mentioned, Larry McMurtry was far more than an author --- he was a lover of books. He once observed, “Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who would rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.”
When a great writer dies, their words live on in the pages of their works. McMurtry’s own Augustus McCrae reminds us, “It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.”
