HOUSTON Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Academy Award-winning screenwriter, Larry McMurty, age 84, died of heart failure the night of March 25, 2021, in his North Texas hometown of Archer City, 25 miles south of Wichita Falls.
In the fall of 1954, then-18-year-old McMurtry, right off the family ranch, arrived in Houston to begin his first semester at Rice Institute (later to be renamed Rice University). As an undergraduate, McMurtry shared a garage apartment on North Boulevard near Rice Village with roommates Douglas Milburn, who would become a German language professor at Rice, and future Houston engineer, John Haydel.
In his memoir,
A Literary Life (2009), McMurtry fondly recalls how at Rice he was introduced to American-born, British “Modernist” poet, T.S. Eliot, and his “stream of consciousness” writing style used in his 1915 poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This was a technique that would also be adopted by Beat-era writer Jack Kerouac, songwriter
Remembering Larry McMurtry, A Writer Who Helped Define The American West kwbu.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kwbu.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Fort Worth Weekly
By KEN WHEATCROFT-PARDUE
Rodeo Parade riders pass Archer City’s iconic movie theater and Booked Up’s Building No. 4, a tiny slice of Texana.
Photo courtesy of Heath Dollar.
Toward the end of the last century, I was attending a Christmas party in the TCU area where a sprinkling of professor types were holding forth on the subjects of the day. Having more than met my quota of holiday cheer and obligatory small talk with people I barely knew, I tried to signal to my wife that we needed to go and quick. Then the chatter turned to Larry McMurtry’s bookstore. That caught my lagging interest.
McMurtry merged identity and place
How late novelist’s early work obliterated Western cliches By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
Published: April 1, 2021, 6:02am
Share: U.S. President Barack Obama presents the 2014 National Humanities Medal to Larry McMurtry during an East Room ceremony at the White House on Sept. 10, 2015, in Washington, D.C. Larry McMurtry was honored for his books, essays and screenplays. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
When I think of Larry McMurtry – who died on Thursday at 84 – I recall a photograph taken in the late 1960s or early 1970s: a portrait of the artist as a young man. In it, he plays with a cat while wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the slogan “Minor Regional Novelist.” Such an image almost perfectly reflects what made McMurtry such a feisty talent, self-deprecating and pointed by turns.