McMurtry, Larry [Jeff]
McMurtry, Larry [Jeff]( 1936– ), novelist.After childhood and high school in Archer City, Texas, he attended North Texas State University and later Rice and Stanford. His first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), about the passing of old-time cattle ranching, set the theme and locale of his best work: a half-mythic West of values, freedom, and heroic friendship, not without drawbacks. Horseman was made into the movie Hud (1963). Leaving Cheyenne (1963) again explored conflicts between old ways and new. The Last Picture Show (1966), about a boy growing up in a small Texas town in the 1950s, also reached film, as did Terms of Endearment (1975), about a terminally ill woman and her eccentric mother. After Somebody's Darling (1978), Cadillac Jack (1982), and The Desert Rose (1983), McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove (1985), a bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize that later was...
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