SOURCE: "The Last Word: An Overlooked Novel," in New York Times Book Review, August 15, 1971, p. 39.

In the following review, Clemons praises Leaving Cheyenne as McMurtry's best work, lamenting its lack of popularity.

Edmund Wilson on one of life's pleasures: "There are few things I enjoy so much as talking to people about books which I have read and they haven't, and making them wish they had—preferably a book that is hard to get or in a language that they do not know." Earlier this summer there appeared an agreeable book called Rediscoveries, edited by David Madden, who enlisted 27 novelists to write about their favorite neglected works of fiction. Besides full-length essays such as Robert Penn Warren's on Andrew Lytle's The Long Night, Joyce Carol Oates on Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker, and Evan S. Connell Jr. on Janet Lewis's The Wife of Martin Guerre, the book has a...