Goodnight, Sweet Prince

Cover photo courtesy of Adam Clark

Editor’s Note:

Goodnight, Sweet Prince

William Jensen

On March 25, 2021, author Larry McMurtry died in Archer City, Texas, which was also the place of his birth. He was eighty-four. A literary novelist who was as popular with readers as he was with critics, he served as the president of PEN for two years, and he won a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award over the course of a six-decade long career. He was also a prolific book reviewer, contributing frequently to The New York Review of Books. For his generation he exemplified a person of letters.

   McMurtry’s legacy is secure. His first decade’s worth of work alone guarantees him a spot in the Texas canon. His debut, Horseman, Pass By, is a taut coming-of-age classic set in 1950s Texas, and he was immediately compared to writers such as Thomas Wolfe, J.D. Salinger, and James Jones. Told from a seventeen-year-old’s point of view, the novel focuses on an aging cattleman and his conflicts with his stepson; the narrative becomes a type of Greek tragedy set in the Southwest, which examines a region’s past as well as its future. McMurtry’s third novel, The Last Picture Show, which was adapted into Peter Bogdanovich’s critically acclaimed film, similarly dealt with small-town life in North Texas and how the Lone Star State struggled with changes in the mid-twentieth century.

   A type of literary bridge between J. Frank Dobie and Sandra Cisneros, McMurtry challenged what Texas storytellers can and should write about. As a young man, he criticized writers such as Dobie for overly glamorizing the nineteenth century west and not recognizing the region’s urban areas. Though he was born into a ranching family with a long history of working with cattle, cowboys, and trail drives, McMurtry often articulated his disdain for romanticizing the west. In interviews he said he thought cowboys were fascists. Rather than writing strictly about men and violence, he penned novels dealing with relationships, women, sexuality, socio-economic struggles, and when he did write about the nineteenth century and the fading era of when everyone rode a horse, he was always ambiguous while remaining elegantly elegiac.

   Lonesome Dove, his 1985 epic, won the Pulitzer and became a bestseller. It is often cited as the best western ever written. McMurtry found his greatest success writing about the nineteenth century (a topic he had avoided in his fiction up until then) because he brought a heightened weight to the material and made his characters as realistic and complicated as those found in Tolstoy or Flaubert. Retired Texas Rangers Woodrow F. Call and Augustus “Gus” McCrae have dreams and nightmares and desires, and they also have regrets about their time as Rangers.  At one point, when speaking about Texas, Gus says, “Hell, we killed off all the people that made this country interesting to begin with.”  McMurtry reinvented the genre simply being honest and realistic about the past.

   Years ago, I heard rumors that McMurtry was jealous of the critical focus that fellow Texas novelist Cormac McCarthy was receiving, that MFA students were imitating All the Pretty Horses but not Moving On, that doctoral students wrote their dissertations on Blood Meridian but not on Leaving Cheyenne. I do not know how true that is, but I can understand. McMurtry’s books were always European in structure and midwestern in language. He was closer to Anthony Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray with his sprawling portrayals of characters both major and minor. Early in his career, he wore a sweatshirt that read, “Minor Regional Novelist” as a type of joke, and it is possible he still felt like everyone saw him as just that—a minor regional novelist—toward the end of his life. Of course, anyone who has read Lonesome Dove or Horseman, Pass By or All my Friends Are Going To Be Strangers knows that Larry McMurtry was not minor at all. He was major. And he wrote about his postage stamp of soil so well that he transcended it. Now with his passing, the Lone Star State must move forward into unknown countries with a new generation holding the reins.

   Books are, of course, made from books, so writers and critics are similarly made out of other writers and critics. And just as McMurtry had a long career as a book critic (he said it was the best way to get free books) this issue of Texas Books in Review shows off some of the newest voices in the state. Gregg Cantrell’s The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism is an in-depth look at Texas politics going back a long way. A Biscuit for Your Shoe by Beatrice Upshaw is a memoir about life in the freedom colonies constructed by African Americans after Emancipation. And on the fiction side of things, Maintaining Texas Pride by Dave Kuhne and Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann show off completely different aspects of life and love between the Piney Woods and the Panhandle plains.

   Larry McMurtry loved Texas. He loved it so much that he felt comfortable criticizing it. Texas Books in Review tries to have a similar attitude. We love Texas. We love books. So we really love Texas books in every form and every genre. We hope you love book reviews about Texas books, too. We hope you enjoy this issue of Texas Books in Review.