SOURCE: "The Ranch as Place and Symbol in the Novels of Larry McMurtry," in South Dakota Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer, 1975, pp. 27-47.

In the following essay, Phillips explores the transition in McMurtry's portrayal of the Western frontier legend, examining the symbolic treatment of the ranch in the author's first five novels.

In his essay on the contemporary literary heritage of the Southwest, Larry Goodwyn singles out Larry McMurtry as the young novelist "most embattled in terms of the frontier heritage."¹ By "frontier heritage" Goodwyn means treating the history of the Southwest as "the unexamined legend—the propagandistic Anglo-Saxon folk myth," which is pastoral, masculine, and racialistic.² Those writers who stay within this legend produce a literature of nostalgia that is largely affirmative, that perpetuates frontier romanticism. The newest generation of southwestern writers, however, has approached the legend and its myths in a skeptical mood; they "are asking radically...