Larry Mcmurtry: 50 books

“McMurtry is an alchemist who converts the basest materials to gold.” — New York Times Book Review The Last Picture Show (1966) is both a rambunctious coming-of-age story and an elegy to a forlorn Texas town trying to keep its one movie house alive. Adapted into the Oscar-winning film,...

“Every line is poetry down and dirty in the mud, right where it belongs.” — Publishers Weekly A stunning literary debut, Horseman, Pass By (1961) exhibits the “full-blooded Western genius” (Publishers Weekly) that would come to define McMurtry’s incomparable sensibility. In the...

Funny, sad, full of wonderful characters and the word-perfect dialogue of which he is the master, McMurtry brings the Thalia saga to an end with Duane confronting depression in the midst of plenty. Surrounded by his children, who all seem to be going through life crises involving sex, drugs, and violence;...

In a letter to her daughter back East, Martha Jane is not shy about her own importance: "Martha Jane -- better known as Calamity -- is just one of the handful of aging legends who travel to London as part of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in Buffalo Girls. As he describes the insatiable curiosity...

The timeless, bestselling four-part epic that began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove takes readers into the lives of Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, two tough-as-nails Texas Rangers in the heyday of the Old West. Dead Man’s Walk As young Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow...

“If Chaucer were a Texan writing today . . . this is how he would have written and this is how he would have felt.”— New York Times In Leaving Cheyenne (1963), which anticipates Lonesome Dove more than any other early novel, the stark realities of the American West play out in a mesmerizing...

In this new edition of Janet Lewis’s classic short novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, Swallow Press executive editor Kevin Haworth writes that Lewis’s story is “a short novel of astonishing depth and resonance, a sharply drawn historical tale that asks contemporary questions about identity and...

Zeke and Ned is the story of Ezekiel Proctor and Ned Christie, the last Cherokee warriors -- two proud, passionate men whose remarkable quest to carve a future out of Indian Territory east of the Arkansas River after the Civil War is not only history but legend. Played out against an American West...