The recent success of Brokeback Mountain —at the box office, with critics, and in numerous awards presentations—has put before the public an American West very different from that of the traditional Western. It comes as no surprise that the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain , adapting Annie Proulx’s short story, was co-written by Larry McMurtry (with Diana Ossana). For more than four decades, in novels, essays, and screenplays, McMurtry has been giving Americans his own vision of the West, one that today is probably more pervasive than that of anyone except John Ford.

Yet McMurtry’s vision is deeper, darker, and more inclusive than Ford’s ever was. McMurtry Country extends from the mythic era of the Texas cattle drives in Lonesome Dove to the suburbs of modern-day Houston in Terms of Endearment . While Peter Bogdanovich’s film version of McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show was quite justly praised for its Ford-like qualities, in truth the clarity and toughness of McMurtry’s script dispelled the lingering romantic mist of Ford’s West.

Ten of McMurtry’s novels have been made into feature films, television movies, or TV series. Here are the five best:

Hud (1963)

Paul Newman is the contemporary cowboy in this enormously successful adaptation of McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By , set, in the words of Pauline Kael, “in the Texas of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios.” Martin Ritt directed, and the starkly handsome black-and-white photography is by James Wong Howe. Patricia Neal, saying her lines in a sexy Texas drawl, plays the housekeeper of the Bannon ranch, and the knowing looks and sharp exchanges of dialogue between her Alma and Newman’s Hud give the film a constant tension and tingle.

Hud is cold-blooded and unprincipled, representing the new predatory spirit of the West, which is meant to contrast with the nineteenth-century values embodied by his father, Homer (Melvyn Douglas). Brandon de Wilde, who called to Alan Ladd to come back at the end of Shane , plays Hud’s teenage nephew, Lon. He does not call to Paul Newman to come back at the end of this film.

Writing about Hud in his book In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas , McMurtry said, “the screenwriters erred badly in following my novel too closely.” He may be the only novelist in history to make that complaint. (Neal won an Oscar for Best Actress and Douglas won for Best Supporting Actor.)

The Last Picture Show (1971)

A landmark in American movies, the first great success for Peter Bogdanovich, and one of the best American films ever about the heartbreak and desolation of small-town Western life, in this case modeled after McMurtry’s home-town, Archer City, Texas, in the early 1950s. As with Hud , McMurtry judged the film version