OBITUARY

Larry McMurtry obituary

Novelist, screenwriter and chronicler of the Wild West who became best known for The Last Picture Show and Brokeback Mountain
McMurtry downplayed his legacy and liked to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “minor regional novelist”
McMurtry downplayed his legacy and liked to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “minor regional novelist”
DIANA WALKER/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

Larry McMurtry thought of the Wild West as a myth, and a pernicious one at that, yet it had a hold on him that he could not shake. As the author of Lonesome Dove (1985), a cowboy epic about a band of ranchers travelling to Montana to make their home, he depicted cowboys not as latter day knights-errant, but as gamblers, cads, and crooks, brutal by necessity. Critics were captivated. The New York Times called the 843 pages of Lonesome Dove “the War and Peace of cattle-drive novels” and it won McMurtry a Pulitzer prize.

Yet it seemed to him that no matter how hard he tried to scratch the bright sheen off of the Wild West, his readers would still be dazzled by it.