We lost two literary giants of the West, Beverly Cleary and Larry McMurtry

How stunning to see the obituaries of two literary giants on the front page of the papers last week: Larry McMurtry and Beverly Cleary. Two writers who changed American literature, two underdogs unconnected to anything resembling a literary establishment, two creative souls from the West who asked America to think differently about the people who live here.

Cleary wrote about the little but very real dramas children face while growing up, taking this population seriously and showing them respect. No nursery rhymes or falling down rabbit holes with Cleary; it’s the hard work of growing up.

McMurty changed the American Western by writing about the real lives of cowboys, showing respect for the humanity of people in the West. No saloons or shootouts at high noon; he focused on the interaction with nature, always a characteristic of the Western, but with McMurtry, a poetic drama amid the loneliness of life on the plains.

The respect these writers showed for people who were usually dismissed changed our world for the better. They de-mythologized the people in their genres — children and cowboys — and portrayed humans in circumstances that could feel isolating and frightening.

Cleary, who died at age 104 in her home in Carmel, Calif., began writing children’s books in the 1950s when she worked as a librarian. Her style was similar to Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott, but she wrote shorter books for the children themselves to read. And tens of millions did.

Similar to McMurtry, Cleary set many of her stories in the West. Ramona Quimby faces the school bully in Portland, Ore., and Ralph S. Mouse rides his little motorcycle around an old hotel in the California mountains. In Cleary’s books, these are real places, not magical frontier moviescapes.

Larry McMurtry died at 84 in the little Texas prairie town he made famous: Archer City. While other Westerns offer page-turning, shoot-’em-up excitement on a backdrop of perpetual optimism about taming the West, McMurtry was more interested in reality than romantic tripe.

He told the dusty, brutal, petty, God’s honest truth, and he wasn’t afraid to challenge well-worn motifs. McMurtry’s cowboys and roughnecks battle nature and the pressing boredom and loneliness of a cattle drive or a small town.

Both authors wrote dozens of books each. You don’t produce bodies of work like those unless you get up every day, brush away the excuses like yesterday’s trail dust and set to work, a trait we admire.

Their work has come to an end, and we turn to McMurtry himself for wisdom in our grief.

As the men on the cattle drive in Lonesome Dove stood around the fresh grave of Sean O’Brien, Woodrow Call, one of McMurtry’s most memorable characters, offered this bit of cowboy wisdom: “Best thing you can do with death is ride off from it.”

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