In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.
Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal...

Long considered to be the brilliant dark horse of literary nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning Larry McMurtry delivers a searing and reflective exploration of what paradise is, whether it exists, and how different it is from life in his Texas hometown.

In 1999, Larry McMurtry, whose wanderlust had been previously restricted to the roads of America, set off for a trip to the paradise of Tahiti and the South Sea Islands in an old-fashioned tub of a cruise boat, at a time when his mother was slipping toward a paradise of her own. Opening up to her son in her final days, his mother makes a...

Larry McMurtry returns to the Old West in a fast-moving, comic tale about a woman determined to conquer anything that stands in the way of an ultimate confrontation with her wayward husband.
In his first historical novel in ten years, Larry McMurtry introduces Mary Margaret, a nineteenth-century version of the formidable, unforgettable Aurora Greenway of Terms of Endearment. Mary Margaret is married to Dickie, who hauls supplies to the forts along the Oregon Trail and, as Mary Margaret rightly suspects, enjoys the pleasures of other women across most of the frontier. Fed up and...

The first time I saw Billy he came walking out of a cloud....Welcome to the wild, hot-blooded adventures of Billy the Kid, the American West's most legendary outlaw. Larry McMurtry takes us on a hell-for-leather journey with Billy and his friends as they ride, drink, love, fight, shoot, and escape their way into the shining memories of Western myth. Surrounded by a splendid cast of characters that only Larry McMurtry could create, Billy charges headlong toward his fate, to become in death the unforgettable desperado he aspires to be in life. Not since Lonesome Dove has there been such...

An unforgettable addition to his widely acclaimed body of work, The Late Child is Larry McMurtry's tender, funny, and poignant sequel to The Desert Rose. McMurtry delivers another rich cast of characters -- and a heartfelt, bittersweet story that unfolds on the open road, in one woman's search for strength, understanding, and hope.
Harmony is the optimistic, resilient Las Vegas ex-showgirl who returns home one day to the news that her beloved daughter has died, in New York, of AIDS. She manages to stay afloat, buoyed by her precocious five-year-old son, Eddie, and her two...

"Mr. Deck, are you my stinkin' Daddy?" In a furious phone call from T.R., the daughter he's never met, Danny Deck gets the jolt of his life. A TV writer who's retired to his Texas mansion, Danny spends his days talking to the answering machines of his ex-lovers from New York to Paris and dreaming of the characters in the sitcom he's created. But suddenly, a hurricane called T.R. is storming into his life...
In his most moving and richly comic contemporary novel since Texasville, Larry McMurtry returns to the modern West he created so masterfully in The Last Picture Show and...

Zeke and Ned is the story of Ezekiel Proctor and Ned Christie, the last Cherokee warriors -- two proud, passionate men whose remarkable quest to carve a future out of Indian Territory east of the Arkansas River after the Civil War is not only history but legend. Played out against an American West governed by a brutal brand of frontier justice, this intensely moving saga brims with a rich cast of indomitable and utterly unforgettable characters such as Becca, Zeke's gallant Cherokee wife, and Jewel Sixkiller Proctor, whose love for Ned makes her a tragic heroine.
At once exuberant...

The time is 1925. The place, St. Louis, Missouri. Charley Floyd, a good-looking, sweet-smiling country boy from Oklahoma, is about to rob his first armored car.
Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry and his writing partner, Diana Ossana, Pretty Boy Floyd traces the wild career of this legendary American folk hero, a young man so charming that it's hard not to like him, even as he's robbing you at gunpoint. From the bank heists and shootings that make him Public Enemy Number One to the women who love him, from the glamour-hungry nation that worships him to the G-men who...

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry comes the first in a four-volume epic journey through the early American frontier, featuring the Berrybender family, English nobility adrift in the American West in the 1830s.

It is 1830, and the Berrybender family--rich, aristocratic, English, and hopelessly out of place--is on its way up the Missouri River to see the untamed West as it begins to open up. With irascible determination--and a great deal of outright chaos--the party experiences both the awesome majesty and brutal savagery of the unexplored land, from buffalo stampedes and...

The second volume in Larry McMurtry's four-part historical epic featuring the Berrybender family as they continue their journey through the West during the 1830s.

In The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry continues the story of Tasmin Berrybender and her eccentric family in the still unexplored Wild West of the 1830s. Their journey is one of exploration, beset by difficulties, tragedies, the desertion of trusted servants, and the increasing hardships of day-to-day survival in a land where nothing can be taken for granted. By now, Tasmin is married to the elusive young mountain man Jim...