Larry McMurtry in the Southern Quote

He was born June 3, 1936 in Wichita Falls, Texas but he grew up on a ranch outside Archer City. In years to come the area would become the model for a town called Thalia that appeared in much of his fiction.

Larry McMurtry’s life has been one filled with books and a love of bookstores. His first start in the business was a job managing a bookstore in Houston, TX. Afterwards, he moved to Washington D.C. where he started a bookstore in Georgetown called Booked Up. Mr. McMurtry opened a second Booked Up in Archer City in 1988. It became one of the largest single-used bookstores in the United States, housing between 400,000 and 450,000 titles. The pressures of Internet bookselling almost caused him to close his doors in 2006. Public sentiment urged him to stay open for another six years until finally, in early 2012 the decision was made to downsize and sell off most of the inventory.

Most of Larry McMurtry’s work has been set either in the old West or contemporary Texas. Some of his best known works are Terms of Endearment and his 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove. Forever the literacy advocate, he once accepted an Oscar wearing jeans and cowboy boots with his dinner jacket and used his acceptance speech to promote books.

Despite being away from his Texas homeland for many years, McMurtry never lost his attraction to the land where he grew up. This edition of Southern Quote pays tribute to author Larry McMurtry who once said, “The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.”