Larry Jeff McMurtry (June 3, 1936 – March 25, 2021) was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas.

His 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries that earned 18 Emmy Award nominations (seven wins).

[6][7] In his memoir, McMurtry said that during his first five or six years in his grandfather's ranch house, there were no books, but his extended family would sit on the front porch every night and tell stories.

In 1942, McMurtry's cousin Robert Hilburn stopped by the ranch house on his way to enlist for World War II, and left a box containing 19 boys' adventure books from the 1930s.

[8] During the 1960–1961 academic year, McMurtry was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he studied the craft of fiction under Frank O'Connor and Malcolm Cowley,[9] alongside other aspiring writers, including Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Peter S. Beagle, and Gurney Norman.

The adventure in the day-glo-painted school bus Furthur was chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

[13] McMurtry won numerous awards from the Texas Institute of Letters: three times the Jesse H. Jones Award—in 1962, for Horseman, Pass By; in 1967, for The Last Picture Show, which he shared with Tom Pendleton's The Iron Orchard; and in 1986, for Lonesome Dove.

[15] In 1986, McMurtry received the annual Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award from the Tulsa Library Trust.

[16] He reflected on his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove, in Literary Life: A Second Memoir (2009), writing that it was the "Gone With the Wind of the West … a pretty good book; it's not a towering masterpiece.

[19] McMurtry was a vigorous defender of free speech and, while serving as president of PEN American Center (now PEN America) from 1989 to 1991, led the organization's efforts to support writer Salman Rushdie,[20] whose novel The Satanic Verses (1988) caused a major controversy among some Muslims, with the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issuing a fatwā calling for Rushdie's assassination, after which attempts were made on his life.

[21] In 1989, McMurtry testified on behalf of PEN America before the U.S. Congress in opposition to immigration rules in the 1952 McCarran–Walter Act that for decades permitted the visa denial and deportation of foreign writers for ideological reasons.

Citing economic pressures from Internet bookselling, McMurtry came close to shutting down the Archer City store in 2005, but chose to keep it open after great public support.

[26] McMurtry became well known for the film adaptations of his work, which were seen by many viewers, especially Hud (from the novel Horseman, Pass By), starring Paul Newman and Patricia Neal;[27] the Peter Bogdanovich–directed The Last Picture Show;[28] James L. Brooks's Terms of Endearment, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture (1984);[29] and Lonesome Dove, which became a popular television miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.

He recovered at the home of his future writing partner Diana Ossana and wrote his novel Streets of Laredo at her kitchen counter.

[42] Larry McMurtry's first three novels, all set in the north Texas town of Thalia following World War II.