Oscar Winner Stresses Culture of the Book

Larry McMurtry isn't your typical Academy Award winner, and his acceptance speech this week showed it. He won the Oscar for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published (along with Diana Ossana) for Brokeback Mountain, based on the story by Annie Proulx.

McMurtry's a novelist as well as a screenwriter, and he's no stranger to westerns. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his novel, Lonesome Dove. He's also author of The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment -- 24 novels in all. Not to mention his screenwriting for television and the big screen.

To top it all off, he's even a bookstore owner. Booked Up began as a bookstore in Washington DC and has since moved to his hometown of Archer City, Texas.

In his acceptance speech for the Oscar, he stressed the importance of the culture of the book. "I'm going to thank all the booksellers of the world. Remember, Brokeback Mountain was a book before it was a movie. From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world, all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book. A wonderful culture, which we mustn't lose."