Larry McMurtry - Dead at 84

 

Larry McMurtry in one of his several Booked Up store locations in Archer City (I think this was taken on the Saturday that the author was liquidating most of the stock in his several locations throughout the city, an event I attended along with hundreds of others from all over the world).

I have been around long enough now that I've been reading some of my favorite authors for twenty, thirty, forty, or even fifty years. That means that I'm starting to lose them one by one now, and yesterday I lost one of the guys I've been reading for over fifty years, Larry McMurtry.

I discovered Larry sometime in the late sixties, back in the days when his connections to Houston were more obvious than they would be in his later years. He was a graduate of the city's Rice University and set some of his earliest novels in Houston. But it was after Larry decided to open up one of his bookstores near the old SPCA dog pound inside Loop 610 that I really felt connected to the man. I don't know how often he manned the cash register himself, but I ran into him there on several Sunday afternoons over the years, and I found him to be quite the bookseller. Depending on the number of shoppers in his little bookshop, Larry was always willing to talk books and book-searches with me until I found just the right thing to make my 25-mile drive to Booked Up worth the frustrating traffic that had to be negotiated to get there. 

According to the beautifully written obituary in the New York Times, Larry McMurtry died (very appropriately) in his Archer City, Texas, home from congestive heart failure on March 25.

He will always be remembered, of course, for the Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove, but he also wrote books (many of which became classic movies) like: The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Horseman Pass By (the movie version was called Hud), and others. Six of his novels were set in Houston: Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), Terms of Endearment (1975), Somebody's Darling (1978), Some Can Whistle (1989), and The Evening Star (1992). 

Fans of the wonderful characters in Lonesome Dove will be pleased to know, too, that McMurtry added to their legend in three 1990s novels: Streets of Laredo, Dead Man's Walk, and Comanche Moon. 

It broke my heart a little when Larry McMurtry decided that he had published his last book, but that feeling is dwarfed by the realization that he is really gone now. Gone but never forgotten.

The middle shelf is home to most of my Larry McMurtry books, but the book I'm proudest to own is a first printing of Lonesome Dove. That one sits on a different shelf along with a couple of other first printings of some of his earlier books.