American novelist who wrote Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove and the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain
Larry McMurtry, who has died aged 84, was a bestselling novelist whose books spawned films as varied as The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment. He was also the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Brokeback Mountain and an essayist who featured in America’s most serious critical journals.
He shot to stardom in 1961 with his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, which became the movie Hud (1963), starring Paul Newman as the eponymous son of a traditional Texan rancher who plays fast and loose with the accepted ways. Melvyn Douglas, as his father, and Patricia Neal, as the housekeeper whom Hud rapes, both won
Oscars.