A Study Guide for Larry McMurtry's "Terms of Endearment"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Larry McMurtry's "Terms of Endearment", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780028671383

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Terms of Endearment

Larry Mcmurtry

1975

Introduction

In the preface of what McMurtry planned to be the end of his Houston trilogy, the author confesses, It was in this book that I first indulged my penchant … for lifting a minor character from one book and giving him or her (usually her) a book of his (or her) own. While Emma was already an established character in the previous books Moving On (1970) and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), her mother, Aurora, takes center stage in the 1975 installment Terms of Endearment. In this novel, the author compares mother and daughter as they navigate their relationships with each other as well as the men in their lives. The themes of family, love, and motherhood appear throughout a story that is filled with comical scenes and thoughtful insight. The book was adapted for film in 1983, and its popularity led McMurtry to follow up with a treatment of Aurora and Emma's children in The Evening Star in 1989.

Author Biography

The son of a rancher, Larry Jeff McMurtry was born on June 3, 1936, in Wichita Falls, Texas. He grew up in Archer City, where his grandparents William and Louisa McMurtry settled in 1889. According to John M. Reilly in Larry McMurtry: A Critical Companion, his grandparents first moved to Denton in 1877, when there were still skirmishes with the Comanche Nation. When they settled in Archer County, they purchased land near a road that cowboys used for their cattle drives. Stories from his uncles about cowboys later inspired his popular western literature.

McMurtry graduated from North Texas State University in 1958 with a bachelor's degree in English. He then moved to Houston, where he earned a master's degree at Rice before attending Stanford on the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from 1960 to 1961. He married Josephine Scott in 1959; their relationship was short-lived, though they had one son, James. In 1961, McMurtry's first novel, Horseman, Pass By, was published; Leaving Cheyenne followed in 1963. Both were later adapted into films. During this time, McMurtry taught at Rice University and Texas Christian University. He earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and established his reputation as an author in 1966 with the novel The Last Picture Show, for which he would later cowrite the screenplay. He moved to Virginia in 1969 and taught at George Mason University before taking a job in 1970 at American University, in Washington, DC, where he also opened