Mr. McMurtry wrote his first novels while teaching English at Texas Christian University, Rice University, George Mason College and American University. He did not like to teach, however, and left him behind as his career progressed.
He moved to the Washington area and with a partner opened his first Booked Up store in 1971, dealing with rare books. He opened the much larger Booked Up in Archer City in 1988 and owned and operated it until his death.
In a 1976 profile of Mr. McMurtry at The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin noted his book-buying skills. “Larry knows which shade of blue cover in a copy of ‘Native Son’ indicates a first impression and which does not,” wrote Trillin. “He knows the precise value of Robert Lowell’s poetry books that Robert Lowell may now have forgotten to write.”
A talent for female characters
Although many of McMurtry’s writings dealt with the West or its Texan heritage, he also wrote novels about Washington (“Cadillac Jack”), Hollywood (“Somebody’s Darling”) and Las Vegas (“The Desert Rose”). There was a comical panache in his best books, along with an ever-present melancholy. He was praised for his ability to create memorable and reliable female characters, including the self-centered widow Aurora Greenway in “Terms of Tenderness”, played by Shirley MacLaine in the film version.
In the novel, Aurora speaks openly about her appetites. “Only a saint could live with me, and I cannot live with a saint,” she says. “Older men cannot come with me, and younger men are not interested.”
“I believe that the only gift that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to invent characters that readers connect with,” McMurtry once wrote. “My characters move them, which is also why those same characters move them when they find them on the screen.”
His early novels were generally rated highly, although Thomas Lask, writing about “The Last Picture Show” in The Times Book Review, said: “Mr. McMurtry is not exactly a typewriter virtuoso. ”Other critics would accept this claim. Mr. McMurtry wrote a lot, some say, and the quantity surpassed the quality. “I crawl 10 pages a day,” boasted Mr. McMurtry in “Books.”