“From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world, all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book, a wonderful culture which we mustn’t lose.”Īs PEN America president from 1989 to 1991, McMurtry was a staunch defender of free speech, testifying before Congress on behalf of PEN in order to oppose provisions of federal immigration laws that allowed the US to exclude writers and others on ideological grounds. Accepting his Oscar in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain, he took the opportunity to thank booksellers and said: “Remember that Brokeback Mountain was a book before it was a movie,” he said. McMurtry was also an antiquarian bookseller, writing in Literary Life that his collection, which spanned more than 30,000 volumes, was “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves”. But he knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t last another generation.” He totally loved cowboys, and so did most of the cowboys he worked with, and that got him through his life.
“To me it was hollow, and I think it was hollow for my father, though he would not have ever brought that to his conscious mind. McMurtry told NPR in 2014 that he did not buy into the myth of cowboy as hero. US president Barack Obama presenting novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry with a National Humanities Medal in 2015.
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