Larry McMurtry, Texas' best-known novelist, once wore a T-shirt bearing the legend "Minor Regional Novelist." There wouldn't be any reason to wear it today, not after Lonesome Dove. When that book soared to million-plus sales, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and became everybody's favorite western novel, McMurtry's bid for a national audience seemed secure. There were other signs of his having arrived. Texasville, his follow-up novel, garnered a thoughtful review in the New York Review of Books, accompanied by the ne plus ultra of literary status, a David Levine caricature. In a further sign of literary respect, the Harper American Literature (1987), a new anthology aimed at university audiences, included an excerpt from The Last Picture Show.
McMurtry's national success confirmed what his long-standing and loyal Texas audience had always felt: that his best work is strongly rooted in the region he knows from the ground up, chiefly Texas and, by extension, the Southwest.
Roots in Texas Ranch Culture
Born in Wichita Falls in 1936, McMurtry lived in Archer City, a small town northwest of Fort Worth, for the first eighteen years of his life. The young McMurtry knew ranching culture intimately and saw it during a time of transition and decline. His grandparents were pioneers, and memories of the epic trail-driving era of the late nineteenth century echoed in family talk on front porches in those long evenings on the plains. McMurtry's Texas changed radically during the period when he came to maturity. In 1940 the population was 60 percent rural; in 1960 it was 60 percent urban. Belonging to that generation of Texans who left the land for the cities, he became the foremost chronicler of that phenomenon.
His first three novels, sometimes called the Thalia trilogy, each deal with rural or small-town life in a time of devitalization. In Horseman, Pass By (1961), his first novel, and still a favorite among Texas readers, the great days of the cattle drives come to a depressing end. An outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease leads to government intervention and the eventual elimination of the herd. Instead of being driven across the plains to market, the cattle are rounded up, driven into a scooped-out pit in the earth, and shot. The old patriarch, Homer Bannon, dies shortly after, leaving the ranch to the unscrupulous rapacity of his stepson, Hud, a sort of gunfighter-hero manqué. Without a frontier as a proper setting for masculine skills, all that is left in the 1950s is narcissistic hardness and selfishness.
Horseman, Pass By is an important book in Texas because it introduced a convincing, realistic voice into a literature previously characterized by gentility and decorum. J. Frank Dobie, the best-known Texas writer when McMurtry came on the scene, wrote many books about the cowboy, but in such treasured Texas classics as A Vaquero of the Brush Country and The Longhorns, the cowboys were as pure as larks. They chased cattle and never women, they talked saltily but not scatologically, and Dobie vastly admired them. By contrast, McMurtry trotted out the F word and mixed it and other racy terms with a yearning lyricism: The result was the most authentic voice to appear in Texas fiction up to that point.
There were other signs of an energized Texas literary scene during the early sixties. Billy Lee Brammer's
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