Larry McMurtry

McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, and raised on his family's cattle ranch near Archer City, the setting for much of his fiction; he studied at Rice University and Stanford before publishing his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, at twenty-five, later adapted into the film Hud.

Lonesome Dove (1985), his best-known novel, follows two aging former Texas Rangers driving a stolen cattle herd from the Rio Grande to Montana, its vast cast and unsentimental violence undercutting the Western myth even as it delivers the genre's grandest epic; it won the Pulitzer Prize and became a landmark television miniseries.

A prolific screenwriter as well as novelist (he co-wrote Brokeback Mountain), McMurtry also ran a celebrated secondhand bookstore in his hometown of Archer City for decades, and died there in 2021.