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Would it surprise you to know that the same talent that wrote Lonesome Dove also wrote Terms of Endearment?

Those who know Larry McMurtry's work are not surprised to find that most have yet to put together the fact that his work encompasses such a wide ranging field; from "Horsemen, Pass by" (made into the motion picture "Hud"), to his collaboration with Diana Ossana on Brokeback Mountain, McMurtry has been a master of the very human characters he has created to leave to us all.

With a style that is singular, even over a forty five year span of work, Larry McMurtry continues to marvel. He has captured life for us all, bottled it up into pages of prose so special that time and again they receive awards. Once you lose yourself in a McMurtry novel you see why he garners the quiet, yet Pulitzer Prize winning, respect and attention. McMurtry's critical acclaim beganamazingly enoughwith his first novel, "Horsemen Pass By", written while he was still a young Texan in college. Through his years as a screen writer, deeply entrenched in the Hollywood landscape, to the present, this master of American fiction continues to astonish us, taking us deeper and deeper into the circumstances of our own existence through characters we will never forget.

Without genre gimmickry, McMurtry allows us to dream of other people and places with our eyes open. He takes us through the Wild West in a fashion so authentic we can almost taste the dust; he brings usfly on the wall styleinto modern lives so otherwise unremarkable that we would have almost overlooked them completely. We are left astonished to know characters like Duane Moore, Aurora Greenway, Augustus McCray or Woodrow Call.

The first to open our eyes to the reality of the American West, McMurtry effectively de-romanticized the Cowboy, and the Wild West legends into an even more potent, and highly effective story line that captivates us all the more simply because we can flavor the authenticity of his prose. His Grandfather and eight of his uncles were actual Texas Cowboys, so Larry has plenty of his own reality to shed light upon a fiction that Hollywood and the dime novel so glamorously depicted. Simple facts like: Cowboys spend weeks at a time without washing, tends to bring us back down to earth about those rustic lives that roamed the empty, barren, landscapes of days gone by.

It is my fondest hope that if you have yet to delve into one of his novels, or watch a film that has been adapted from one, that you will finally pick

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