![]() ![]() In the course of about six months, Duane and Sonny learn hard lessons about life and love. Neither is in fact an orphan, but neither lives with his surviving parent they rent rooms in the town’s rooming house, support themselves working in the oil fields, and hang out at the town’s pool hall, run by their aging friend and mentor Sam the Lion. Its central characters are Sonny Crawford and Duane Moore, two boys in their last year of high school. McMurtry’s third novel is set in the small, dying North Texas town of Thalia (there is a town with that name in Texas, but its geography does not fit the fictional town, which is clearly modeled on Archer City). This novel and McMurtry’s next, Leaving Cheyenne, are clearly preparations for the success of The Last Picture Show. This first novel, a story of ranch life, narrated by a seventeen-year-old boy whose grandfather’s livelihood and life are ended when his herd of cattle must be destroyed, sets many of McMurtry’s themes: the ease with which people learn to betray others, in this case the old man’s betrayal by Hud, his stepson the mental and physical wear inflicted by the harsh Texas land and the importance of the affection an older woman (in this case the Bannon family’s black cook, Halmea) can give to a young man. 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. ![]()
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