KEEPERS OF THE LITERARY TEXAN This fall, University of Texas Press will release Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry, edited by George Getschow.

BY LUCIA ARBERY SIMEK

In writer Larry McMurtry’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, The Last Picture Show, the teenage protagonist Sonny, on the cusp of adulthood, finally gets an education. In the mid-1950s in a fictional place called Thalia, based on McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, Texas, Sonny learns everything by dint of his freefall into a few spectacular missteps, fueled both by his hungry libido and a remarkably gentle heart, the latter being a rarity of some distinction in rough-and-tumble Thalia, especially in the eyes of the town’s women. The nature of his heart—its ability to at once observe and imagine the condition of others and then carry those heavy observations with him— often makes Sonny low, depressed, in need of somewhere to offload the burden of his perception. His “teachers”—two lovers, each old enough to be his mother; a diner waitress; a pool hall owner; a nonverbal friend, and the town’s most avid moviegoer—all understand his sensitivity and by turns offer him companionship as a reprieve from the weight of it.

Also a witness to Sonny, the reader of the book gets to load bear for him, too. It’s a way, really, for McMurtry to give us a version of his own story to hold because it’s got nowhere else to go.

Larry McMurtry certainly didn’t invent this literary load shift, but throughout his over-60-year career in letters, at a time when the old traditions of ranching and roping were dying away, the stories and essays he wrote about the particulars of Texas’ physical and cultural landscape