A prolific writer of rare lyrical gifts, Larry McMurtry has enjoyed a reputation as the most eloquent voice of the contemporary American West. Born and raised in rural Texas, McMurtry published his first several novels to critical kudos, but these initial literary efforts won him few home-grown fans. Some Texans were offended by the author's irreverent and unsentimental treatment of his home state, as he exposed the limits of Texas mythology, and portrayed small towns such as Thalia (the fictional equivalent of Archer City, where McMurtry graduated from high school) as desiccated and stifling. Scholar Lera Patrick Tyler Lich describes McMurtry's dusty Thalia as "a place to go insane, a place to be lonely," noting that "a vast expanse around the town and a wind that blows into it seem to choke out life." In later works, McMurtry did equal justice to Texas's sprawling...