Death of Larry McMurtry, the American "Flaubert of the Great Plains"

He was the cantor of the American West and

the Texas

.

American writer Larry McMurtry, famous for having co-wrote the screenplay for

, has died at the age of 84, AFP learned on Friday.

"

," his agent Amanda Lundberg said on Friday.

The writer "

", She said in a statement.

His son, folk singer James McMurtry, and grandson were also present alongside the artist, who will be buried in his home state of Texas.

Read also: Larry McMurtry, love at sixty

Larry McMurtry had shared in 2006 with Diana Ossana an Oscar for the screenplay of The

, an adaptation of a short story by Annie Proulx, in which the Texan writer revisited the western, his favorite genre, through the prism of a homosexual love story between two cowboys.

This new theme had seduced the public and earned the film a huge success in theaters, with the key an Oscar for best director and a nomination in the category of best feature film.

The best feather in the West

Described as "

" by one of his editors, Larry McMurtry has written some thirty novels, including his greatest success

, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986. Author of over forty screenplays, his novel

had revealed it in the early 1960s and had been adapted for the cinema under the title

with Paul Newman and Patricia Neal.

The themes of the cowboy and rural America were still present in his novel

, which McMurtry had adapted as a screenplay for the film of the same name, directed by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971 and which had already earned him an Oscar nomination.

Cinephiles had found him soon after thanks to his novel

, again adapted for an eponymous film with Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson and Debra Winger, who had received the Oscar for best feature film.

Passionate about books, the writer had opened at the end of the 1980s one of the largest independent bookstores in the United States in the small Texas town of Archer City, where he was founded.