Larry McMurtry

(1936 - 2021)

Born in Archer City, Texas, the prolific novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry has won a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. When asked about the success of his 843-page novel Lonesome Dove, which was adapted as a TV miniseries watched by twenty-six million viewers in 1989, he said that his door stopper “isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. All I had wanted to do was write a novel that demythologized the West. Instead, it became the chief source of Western mythology. Some things you cannot explain.”