Who wrote the novel "Terms of Endearment" that was later adapted into a 1983 Best Picture film?

Larry Jeff McMurtry (born June 3, 1936) is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller, and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas.

McMurtry is perhaps best known for the film adaptations of his work, especially "Hud" (from the novel "Horseman, Pass By"), starring Paul Newman and Patricia Neal; James L. Brooks's "Terms of Endearment", which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture (1984); and "Lonesome Dove", which became a popular television miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.

The book and film covers 30 years of the relationship between Aurora Greenway ( and her daughter Emma.

McMurtry states in his memoir that he spent his first five or six years in his grandfather's house on a ranch without books, but his extended family would sit on the front porch every night and tell stories. In 1942, when his cousin Robert Hilburn on his way to enlist for World War II stopped by the ranch house and left a box containing 19 books, he began to read. The books were standard boys' adventure tales of the 1930s, and he read them to tatters.