MC M U R TRY H AS PRODUC E D A BODY OF WOR K TH AT, BY A N Y M E AS U R E , I S E X TR AOR DIN A RY.
If he had to pick his best book, he probably would choose “Duane’s Depressed,” which is part of a series that started with “The Last Picture Show.” He considers “Lonesome Dove” to be the “Gone with the Wind” of the West.
Intellectual Home When it was time for McMurtry to go to college, his mother suggested Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls. “My father then had the worst idea of all, which was that I go to Texas A&M and become a vet,” McMurtry wrote in his latest tome, “Books: A Memoir,” which talks about his passion for books. “I’m not sure why my father made that suggestion, which, had it been adopted, would have been a mistake of epic proportion.” McMurtry was saved from this fate by the happy accident of seeing a television program about Rice, then called the Rice Institute. “The campus had what I supposed to be an Oxford-like look,” McMurtry said. “Actually, the architecture was partly Moorish. I, of course, had never been to Oxford at the time, but the program pointed out that the school was organized on a residential college system, like the real Oxford.” McMurtry arrived at Rice in 1954, and he moved into a garage apartment on South Boulevard near Shadyside. He had three roommates, one of whom was Douglas Milburn, who received a B.A. in 1956, an M.A. in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1964 in German. For McMurtry, one of his fondest memories of Rice was Fondren Library, which, at the time, contained 600,000 volumes. “I was, to say the least, thrilled,” McMurtry wrote in “Books,” “and when I went back to Rice as a graduate student and later a professor, I still spent much of my time wandering around Fondren.” McMurtry said that he romanticized Fondren in his book “All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers,” in which the
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hero, Danny Deck, sleeps on the couches of the library. When McMurtry arrived at Rice, the university was just beginning to balance humanities and the sciences. “It was still, however, an oldfashioned, Johns Hopkins-type school with a lot of philology, German, French and Old English,” he said. “It was taught by a generation of people like Alan McKillop, who had studied at Harvard with William James.” McMurtry also remembered being taught by English professors Jackson Cope and Wilfred Dowden, who died in 1999. Sumarie Dowden said that her husband often talked about the young McMurtry. “Larry was in Wilfred’s freshman class,” she recalled, “and he said that Larry was very smart and knew a lot more about literature than any student his age.” Dowden encouraged McMurtry to take a writing class with George Williams ’23. The class was reserved for upperclassmen, but McMurtry didn’t stay at Rice long enough to be eligible for the course. “I knew I was going to leave Rice almost from the time I arrived,” McMurtry admits. Like many Rice students of the time, McMurtry fell victim to Math 100. He would, however, be a part of Rice on two other occasions: as a graduate student from 1958 to 1960 and a professor from 1963 to 1969. Though McMurtry left Rice, he still thinks fondly of the university. “I began reading seriously when I was at Rice,” he explained. “I love Rice and think of it as my intellectual home.”
Career Choices McMurtry transferred to North Texas State College (now University of North Texas) in Denton, where his interest in writing began after taking a creative writing class with English Professor Jim Brown. McMurtry received his B.A. in 1958 from North Texas and returned to Rice for graduate studies in English, earning an M.A. in 1960. He originally planned to pursue a doctorate in English but settled for the master’s. By then he had finished drafts of his first two novels, and he used the manuscripts to enter the Wallace Stegner Fellowship creative writing program at Stanford University, where he spent a year. From California, McMurtry returned to his home state to teach at Texas Christian University for a year before moving back to Rice to teach freshman English and creative writing. “I had the ideal teaching job,” McMurtry said. He had to teach only two classes a semester, while at TCU, he taught five. “If I had wanted to remain in academia,” he said, “I could have stayed at Rice.” Instead, he decided to write books and become an antiquarian bookseller.
Writing McMurtry developed his method of writing when he was 23. He would get up early every day, including holidays and weekends, and write five pages. As he became more proficient, he increased the number of pages to 10. “Very quickly I came to realize that I