Larry Jeff McMurtry

Larry Jeff McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, the son of a rancher, and grew up in Archer City in a home without books until he discovered literature as a teenager. Educated at North Texas State and Stanford University alongside Ken Kesey, his early novels Horseman, Pass By (filmed as Hud starring Paul Newman) and The Last Picture Show (1966) exposed the gritty, melancholic reality of declining Texas ranch towns.

In 1985, McMurtry published his monumental 843-page western epic Lonesome Dove, chronicling two aging Texas Rangers driving cattle to Montana; it won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into an iconic television miniseries. With Diana Ossana, he won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. A legendary antiquarian book collector, he transformed his hometown of Archer City into a "book town" housing over 400,000 volumes in Booked Up.