Authors Like Larry McMurtry

Cormac McCarthy

American · b. 1933 · Novelist · Pulitzer 2007

Blood Meridian (1985) follows a scalp-hunting gang through the borderlands of the 1840s and 1850s; the Border Trilogy that began with All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award in 1992, moves the same country into the twentieth century. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, and he died in Santa Fe in June 2023. After his death Vanity Fair published Augusta Britt's account of a relationship with McCarthy that began in 1976, when she was 16 and he was 42.

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Wallace Stegner

American · b. 1909 · Novelist and historian · Pulitzer 1972

Stegner founded the creative writing program at Stanford, where his students included McMurtry himself. Angle of Repose, a novel about a nineteenth-century marriage in the mining camps of the West, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, and The Spectator Bird won the National Book Award in 1977. Angle of Repose drew heavily on the letters of the illustrator Mary Hallock Foote, and his use of passages from them without full credit has remained controversial.

Annie Proulx

American · b. 1935 · Novelist and short-story writer · Pulitzer 1994

Proulx's first novel, Postcards, won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1993, making her the first woman to win it; The Shipping News won the National Book Award in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. She moved to Wyoming in 1994, and Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999) includes “Brokeback Mountain”, first published in The New Yorker in 1997 and adapted for the screen by McMurtry and Diana Ossana.

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Ivan Doig

American · b. 1939 · Novelist and memoirist

Doig was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana; his mother died on his sixth birthday and he was raised by his father and his grandmother. This House of Sky, his memoir of that childhood, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His novels, including English Creek (1984) and Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), follow Montana ranching families across generations.

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Willa Cather

American · b. 1873 · Novelist · Pulitzer 1923

Cather moved from Virginia to Nebraska at nine, and her prairie novels are about the settlers, many of them European immigrants, who broke that land in the nineteenth century; the title character of My Ántonia was modelled on a Bohemian girl from her childhood in Red Cloud. One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) moves her to the Southwest.

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Charles Portis

American · b. 1933 · Novelist

Portis was a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, including a spell as its London bureau chief, before leaving journalism in 1964 to write fiction. True Grit (1968), narrated by Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old who sets out from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to avenge her father's murder, was filmed in 1969 and again in 2010. He wrote five novels in all, including The Dog of the South (1979).

Kent Haruf

American · b. 1943 · Novelist

Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, and set his novels in Holt, a fictional small town on the eastern Colorado plains. Plainsong (1999) was a finalist for the National Book Award; Eventide (2004) and Benediction (2013) return to the same town, and Our Souls at Night was published in 2015, after his death.

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Thomas McGuane

American · b. 1939 · Novelist and short-story writer

McGuane, born in Wyandotte, Michigan, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford in 1966–67, a few years after McMurtry, and finished his first novel, The Sporting Club, there. Ninety-Two in the Shade, about rival fishing guides in Key West, was nominated for the National Book Award. He has ranched in Montana for decades, and his novels and stories deal with ranching, fishing, cutting horses and marriages coming apart.

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Philipp Meyer

American · b. 1974 · Novelist

Meyer was born in Baltimore, left school at sixteen and worked as a derivatives trader and an EMT before publishing American Rust (2009). The Son (2013) follows three generations of a Texas family, from Eli McCullough, captured by Comanches as a boy in 1849, to his great-granddaughter, an oil baroness; it was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize and became a television series in 2017.

Edna Ferber

American · b. 1885 · Novelist · Pulitzer 1925

Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Jewish family, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for So Big. Her big American novels, among them Show Boat (1926), Cimarron (1930) and Giant (1952), were bestsellers and successful films. Giant is a Texas cattle-and-oil dynasty novel, filmed in 1956, and like much of her work it gives weight to the characters who face discrimination.