He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

He accepted his Oscar wearing jeans and cowboy boots along with his dinner jacket and used his speech to promote books by reminding his audience that "Brokeback Mountain" was a short story by E. His former wife Jo Scott McMurtry an English professor is also the author of five books. Martin Staples Shockley PhD (1908–2003) was one McMurtry's English professors at North Texas.

He is known for his 1975 novel Terms of Endearment his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove a historical saga that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive their cattle from the Rio Grande to a new home in the frontier of Montana and for co-writing the adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Larry Jeff McMurtry (born June 3 1936) is an American novelist essayist bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas.