LEGENDARY writer Larry McMurtry, who won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, has died at the age of 84.
McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and composed 30 screenplays, including Brokeback Mountain.
A spokeswoman for the family confirmed his death, but did not yet give a cause.
McMurtry won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his book Lonesome Dove, about two retired Texas Rangers who drove stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana.
“It isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination,” he told Texas Monthly in 2016.
“All I had wanted to do was write a novel that demythologized the West.
“Instead, it became the chief source of western mythology. Some things you cannot explain.”
He won an Academy Award for the Brokeback Mountain screenplay in 2006 – and he walked on stage to accept his trophy in cowboy boots.
“Easier to write about the homefolks, the old folks, cowboys, or the small town han to deal with the more immediate and frequently less simplistic experience of city life,” he said, according to the Washington Post.
His novels also include Streets of Laredo, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Comanche Moon, and Dead Man’s Walk.
“I believe the one gift that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to make up characters that readers connect with,” McMurtry once wrote, acccording to The New York Times.
“My characters move them, which is also why those same characters move them when they meet them on the screen.”
McMurtry was also a bookseller for 50 years, and owned Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, which is one of America’s largest bookstores.
At one point, it occupied six buildings and held around 400,000 novels.
“Unfit for ranch work because of my indifference to cattle, I went instead into the antiquarian book trade, becoming, in effect, a book rancher,” he wrote in his 1999 memoir Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.
