McMurtry's productivity suggests that he is a compulsive writer, and he has admitted that he gets a headache if he does not complete his self-imposed task of writing at least 5 double-spaced pages every day--more than 1,800 manuscript pages a year. McMurtry may have produced a phenomenal amount of work because he is the offspring of a Texas ranching family that extolled hard work and physical production.
Larry Jeff McMurtry was born 3 June 1936 in Wichita Falls, Texas, to William Jefferson McMurtry Jr. and Hazel Ruth McIver McMurtry and grew up in Archer County, Texas, in a family that had ranched in Texas for three generations. There he learned about Southwesterners' violence, intolerance, hypocrisy, and puritanical attitudes, as well as their strength of character, endurance, emphasis on hard work, courage, and particularly what became the most important tools in his workshop--the powers of storytelling and humor. He also discovered one of the chief themes of his work, what he calls the tragic theme of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Southwest--the end of a way of life signaled by the move off the land. Climbing on the barn at night, young McMurtry looked out across the Texas prairie and sent his imagination with the night trains to Los Angeles and the eighteen-wheelers pointed toward Fort Worth.
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