Texan writer and screenwriter Larry McMurtry died Thursday, March 25, at the age of 84, at his home in Archer City, Texas. For its French publisher, Oliver Gallmeister, joined by The world, it’s about “Most underrated of the great American novelists, the equal of Jim Harrisson, Cormac Mac Carthy or Richard Ford, a great storyteller who created unforgettable stories and characters “. We cannot prove him wrong.
In half a century, Larry McMurtry has written over sixty novels, essays and screenplays, including the one for the film Brokeback Mountain (co-signed with Diana Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Oscar in 2006. Several of his own novels have also been screened, such The last session directed by Peter Bogdanovich and Tender passions by James L. Brooks, winner of the Oscar for best film in 1986. Larry McMurtry was also consecrated in 1986 by the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for the first part of his quadrilogy “Lonesone Dove”, which sought to demystify the Far West and its heroic cowboys while keeping alive and regenerating the tradition of the literary western across the Atlantic.
Born June 3, 1936 in Archer City, Texas, Larry McMurtry spent his youth at the family ranch. After studying literature, he started writing in 1961 with Cavalier, go your way subsequently brought to the screen with Paul Newman in the title role. This first novel unpublished to date – its publication is scheduled in France next October – depicts the American West at the precise moment when cars supplant horses and games of billiards the vigils by the fireside that young McMurtry met with his grandfather. Along with his promising literary career, McMurtry taught literature at university and opened a bookstore in 1969 in Washington DC, and, nearly twenty years later, a second in his hometown. In 1989-1990, this close friend of Susan Sontag chaired the Pen American Center which defends the freedom of creation and expression. He collaborated on The New York Review of Books on subjects relating to the American West.
Portrait painter of strong women and depressed men
McMurtry was a prolific compulsive writer. Every day, he had to shed five pages, or 1,800 per year, otherwise he would suffer from headaches. To read his work is, over the course of several romantic series, to grow old with his favorite characters. For example, Woodrow Call, Texas and his teammate Gus McCrae, played in theaters by Robert Duval and Tommy Lee Jones. These are in turn – if we follow the chronological order of the “Lonesome Dove” saga, Texas Rangers in 1840, cattle thieves in 1880, bounty hunters with osteoarthritis the following decade while “the old figures of the West ” vanish forever in a cloud of dust and oblivion. The successive adventures of these two friends will lead them to face looters, Indians, bears, Mexican soldiers, storms and traffickers of all kinds, while witnessing the mutations of the Great Plains.
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