Just before he died, Ossana sent me an email. “I keep walking through my house and remembering so many things he did, where he’d sit, typing at the counter, staring out at the mountains for hours at a time,” she wrote. McMurtry, who was 84, died on Thursday of congestive heart failure, as his writing partner, Diana Ossana, confirmed. He spent his final days surrounded by Ossana her daughter, Sara his wife, Faye Kesey his son, James his grandson, Curtis and Ossana’s three dogs, all of whom adored McMurtry. After learning that McMurtry wrote five double-spaced pages of fiction on his manual typewriter every day of the week, just after breakfast, I vowed that I would do the very same thing each morning before going off to my job as a reporter at a Dallas newspaper. “How hard could it be?” I asked, leafing through The Last Picture Show for the hundredth time.

In my early twenties, I decided to compose my own McMurtrian novel about a boy coming of age in rural Texas. During my trips back to Wichita Falls, I made regular excursions to Archer City, hoping to run into him. I wrote papers about him for my English classes in which I always pointed out that he and I were, more or less, neighbors. I had no idea that a writer could be famous.īy college, I was an unabashed McMurtry fanboy. McMurtry turned and gave us a brief wave. Seeing the baffled looks on our faces, she explained that McMurtry was an Archer City rancher’s son and had written the novel on which the movie was based. “That’s Larry McMurtry!” a woman exclaimed. He had thick, tousled black hair and wore Buddy Holly–style glasses. One of them pointed at a thin young man quickly crossing the street. But just before we headed back to our car in defeat, several adults in the crowd began buzzing. For the next hour, nothing else happened. We watched as the film crew moved equipment from one building to another.

When we arrived in Archer City, the three of us gathered with other onlookers at the end of the street. My friend’s older brother told us we had to be there. Rumor had it that one of the actresses in the film, Cybill Shepherd, was going to be filming a nude scene that day. At the time, Peter Bogdanovich was shooting a movie called The Last Picture Show, about some teenagers trying to find happiness in a desolate Texas town. In 1970, when I was a junior high school student living in Wichita Falls, I rode one afternoon with a friend and his older brother to Archer City, a town located 25 miles away. This story originally published online on March 26, 2021.

The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry