[This entry was updated by Sarah English (Meredith College) from the entry by John Gerlach (Cleveland State University) in DLB 143: American Novelists Since World War II, Third Series, pp. 137-150.]

Larry McMurtry has been known to sport a sweatshirt bearing the inscription Minor Regional Novelist, a statement that could be read as self-flagellation, mocking self-irony, realistic self-appraisal, or an attempt (like Hester Prynne's) to embroider shame into a badge of triumph. In writing about his own region McMurtry has been writing about myth and the modern condition, about the uneasy fit between a faded heroic past and the constricting demands of the present. He has been ambivalent about both the past and present, as he states in "Take My Saddle from the Wall: A Valediction" (In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas, 1968): "I am critical of the past, yet attracted to it; and though I am even more...