After the publication of his first three novels he won a Guggenheim fellowship that led to a seminal book of essays about Texas, In a Narrow Grave (1968), whose themes included some of those reflected in his fiction. In 1966 he spent a year teaching at George Mason University outside Washington DC he and Jo divorced the same year. McMurtry taught creative writing for a year at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, then back at Rice. A short story produced in a writing class, which he eventually expanded into his first novel, won him acceptance as a William Stegner fellow on Stanford University’s creative writing programme, where classmates included Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey. He graduated from North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in 1958, and earned an MA in English at Rice University in Houston in 1960, by which time he had married Jo Scott, a fellow student. It was a book-free environment, but when Larry was six, a cousin who went off to the second world war left a box of 19 novels, mostly adventure stories, which he read and re-read. He was born in Wichita Falls in Texas, but grew up outside Archer City, 25 miles south, on his grandfather’s ranch, with his parents, Hazel (nee McIver) and William McMurtry. But his fiction also followed the path of his life, which expanded beyond the bounds of his home state even if it always returned to its roots. McMurtry’s subject, throughout his career, was his native Texas, and he wore with pride a T-shirt bearing the label once slapped upon him by a critic, “minor regional novelist”. He co-wrote the screenplay, which won a Bafta, with Peter Bogdanovich for the director’s 1971 film, which produced supporting actor Oscars for Ben Johnson as the father-figure and Cloris Leachman as the unhappy wife of a high school football coach having an affair with Timothy Bottoms. The third of what McMurtry later labelled his Thalia trilogy (after the fictionalised version of his hometown, Archer City, in which the first book was set) was The Last Picture Show (1966), the title referring to the closing of the movie theatre in a dying Texas town. It was filmed as Lovin’ Molly (1974) by Sidney Lumet, with Anthony Perkins, Beau Bridges and Blythe Danner caught in Lumet’s awkward mix of New York sensibilities and Texas narration.

His second novel, Leaving Cheyenne (1963), was in many ways his best, a Texas-set Jules et Jim love triangle told in three sections, set at 20-year intervals and each narrated by one of the three.

Books by larry mcmurtry