Texas Originals

Bill Wittliff

January 21, 1940–June 9, 2019

The acclaimed screenwriter, publisher, and photographer Bill Wittliff was born in 1940 in the small south Texas town of Taft. He was raised by a single mother who worked as a local switchboard operator, a history Wittliff drew upon when writing the screenplay for the 1981 film Raggedy Man.

Wittliff studied journalism at The University of Texas at Austin and later founded and ran the Encino Press, which published distinctive books chronicling Texas and the Southwest.

Wittliff had a gift for telling stories on screen. He wrote screenplays for the films The Black Stallion, Barbarosa, and Legends of the Fall. His 1989 television adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove earned him the Writers Guild of America Award.

Wittliff collaborated with Willie Nelson on several occasions, most notably on the film adaptation of Nelson’s album Red Headed Stranger, which Wittliff wrote, directed, and produced.

Despite his success in Hollywood, Wittliff remained a proud Texan, working from his home in Austin and nurturing a local community of writers and filmmakers.

Wittliff died in 2019. His legacy lives on in the remarkable archive that he and his wife Sally established at Texas State University in San Marcos. The Wittliff Collections, as the archive is now known, collects and preserves the literature, photography, and music of the greater Southwest, promoting the region’s spirit of place in the wider world.

For More about Bill Wittliff 

The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos is a treasure trove of works by Texas photographers, authors, and songwriters. Originally founded by Wittliff and his wife Sally in 1986, the archive’s mission is "to collect, preserve and share the artistic process that springs from the Southwestern imagination." Among the archive’s holdings are the papers of authors Cormac McCarthy and Sandra Cisneros as well as hand-written lyrics by songwriters Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker.