But his fiction also followed the path of his life, which expanded beyond the bounds of his home state even if it always returned to its roots.
McMurtry’s subject, throughout his career, was his native Texas, and he wore with pride a T-shirt bearing the label once slapped upon him by a critic, “minor regional novelist”. He co-wrote the screenplay, which won a Bafta, with Peter Bogdanovich for the director’s 1971 film, which produced supporting actor Oscars for Ben Johnson as the father-figure and Cloris Leachman as the unhappy wife of a high school football coach having an affair with Timothy Bottoms. The third of what McMurtry later labelled his Thalia trilogy (after the fictionalised version of his hometown, Archer City, in which the first book was set) was The Last Picture Show (1966), the title referring to the closing of the movie theatre in a dying Texas town.
It was filmed as Lovin’ Molly (1974) by Sidney Lumet, with Anthony Perkins, Beau Bridges and Blythe Danner caught in Lumet’s awkward mix of New York sensibilities and Texas narration. His second novel, Leaving Cheyenne (1963), was in many ways his best, a Texas-set Jules et Jim love triangle told in three sections, set at 20-year intervals and each narrated by one of the three.
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