It’s the birthday of prolific novelist Larry McMurtry (b. 1936), who writes mostly about the West and whose work ranges from “meh” to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Lonesome Dove (1985).

McMurtry was born on a cattle ranch outside Archer City, Texas, the oldest of four, and at the age of six received a gift of 19 adventure books from a cousin who was going off to the war. This made him into a reader, and he always preferred books to ranching. (I’ll be honest: so do I.)

McMurtry earned a B.A. at North Texas State College in 1958 and an M.A. at Rice University in 1960 and then held the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction at Stanford from 1960-1961, after which he returned to Texas and taught at several universities, including Texas Christian University and Rice. His first novel, Horseman, Pass By, came out in 1961 and was made into the film Hud in 1963 starring Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, Paul Newman, and Patricia Neal. This was followed by Leaving Cheyenne (1963, made into the film Lovin’ Molly) and The Last Picture Show (1966, also a film), one of McMurtry’s best-known novels; it tells the story of two teens, Sonny and Duane, growing up in a dead-end Texas town based on Archer City. McMurtry continued the story of Duane in four more novels, ending with Rhino Ranch: A Novel (2009).

McMurtry would go on to write something like 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, some of which, as one critic wrote, appear to be “typed rather than written,” but some of which are notable, including Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment (1975). McMurtry also won an Academy Award with Diana Ossana for the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005), based on E. Annie Proulx’s short story.

McMurtry is also well known as a bookstore owner, having opened used bookstores in Washington, D.C., and Archer City, both called Booked Up. The Archer City location is still open and is one of the largest used bookstores in the U.S., even after selling off 300,000 titles at a famous auction in 2012.

McMurtry has been married twice, divorced once, and raised his son alone after his divorce.

Have a Monday that just keeps getting better and better (actually better and better, not sarcastically said with an eyeroll, as in, “This just keeps getting better and better”) and stay scrupulously honest to the data.