McMurtry himself eventually said that Horseman, Pass By, published when he was only twenty-two, was an immature work. A regional writer, he has transcended the usual limitations of regional writers and attracted a broad audience. Although his fictional locales moved away from Texas for a time, in his later works he has gone back to the settings and sometimes the characters of his earlier works. He has shown an unusual ability to depict interesting and sometimes outrageous characters, especially women. McMurtry has used a variety of styles, from the elegiac to the rapid narrative, from the hilarious to the mournful.

He has been most successful in exploring the past and present of his native Texas, a state and a state of mind that provide seemingly inexhaustible material for his special blend of satire, romance, and tragedy.

McMurtry has shown the ability to change his locales and his subject matter when he feels the need for novelty, and he has been willing to revive characters from earlier novels to suit new purposes. Later, he invested the Western novel with new vigor in two novels, his classic Lonesome Dove and the satiric Anything for Billy, which holds the legend of Billy the Kid up to ridicule.

His trilogy, following these early novels, dealt with the tangled relationships among somewhat older characters and reflected McMurtry’s own move from Archer City to Houston. In the early years of his career, he dealt with life in the dying towns and decaying ranches of North and West Texas, often using boys on the brink of manhood to provide perspective on a way of life that had reached a stage of corruption and betrayal. Larry McMurtry’s (1936 -) best fiction has used the Southwest as its location and the characters typical of that area for its subjects.

Larry mcmurtry novels