The Last Picture Show (1966)

A new generation discovers The Last Picture Show, “about as close to gem-like perfection as a novel can.” —Thomas Powers, from the new introduction. Whereas Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is universally hailed as the greatest novel of the Old West, The Last Picture Show is increasingly recognized as a standard bearer of contemporary Western fiction. First published in 1966, this elegiac masterpiece has been better known for the Academy Award-winning film that it spawned in 1971, but this new hardcover edition affirms McMurtry’s centrality to the twentieth-century canon, revealing him as “an alchemist who converts the basest material into gold” (New York Times Book Review). Set in north central Texas in the mythical town of Thalia during the Korean War, the novel, with its heavy dose of realism. portrays the frustrated lives of the sexually charged teenagers and jaded adults McMurtry grew up with, challenging stereotypes employed by previous novelists and screenwriters who banally filled a mythic West with “cowboys and Indians.” Comparing the novel to Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Thomas Powers brilliantly contextualizes The Last Picture Show for a new generation.