Back when the late Larry McMurtry and his writing partner, Diana Ossana, were promoting Brokeback Mountain, the acclaimed 2005 drama that would earn them Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, my interview with them inevitably turned to McMurty’s Lonesome Dove — his 1985 novel, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and the epic 1989 miniseries adaptation starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. But when I noted that both the novel and the Emmywinning miniseries were widely credited with reviving the classic myth of the American West, McMurtry said no one was more surprised by that than he was.
“I always thought of as -mythic,” he told me. “That’s not the way it was received, of course. Authors very rarely have any control over how
