Larry McMurtry
1934 - 2021
American novelist Larry McMurtry died last week at the age of 84. I confess that I have only read two of McMurtry's novels, but they were among some of the best works of fiction that I had ever read.
One of them became a memorable motion picture, released in 1971...
And this one, a novel that can only be descried as "epic", won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986. It 1989, it was turned into one of the great television mini-series of all time and starred Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones....
His novels, per his obituary in the New York Times, "demythologized the American West with his unromantic depictions of life on the 19th century frontier and in contemporary small town Texas." In addition to over thirty novels, he is credited with writing over thirty screenplays, and he won an Oscar for one of them, "Brokeback Mountain" in 2006. His novel "Terms of Endearment" was adapted into a movie that won the Best Picture Academy Award in 1983. His debut novel, "Horseman, Pass By", was made into the 1963 movie "Hud", starring Paul Newman and won three Oscars.
In addition to his Oscar and his Pulitzer, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 by President Obama.
He was also book collector and antiquarian bookseller of some note, amassing a collection of over 400,000 volumes.
Reading about him upon his death has inspired me to seek out and read many of his other works, which should be a good self-improvement project for the year 2021.
RIP Larry McMurtry.
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