The Last Picture Show

The Last Picture Show is Larry McMurtry’s third novel, published in 1966 and set in the small fictional Texas town of Thalia in the early 1950s. McMurtry grew up in this kind of place, the West Texas oil and ranch country where a small downtown could fold up between one decade and the next. The novel’s title refers to the closing of the town’s only movie theater, and it stands in for the larger sense of an entire way of life ending around the characters who do not yet know they are losing it.

The story follows a small group of teenagers, mostly Sonny Crawford and Duane Jackson, as they finish high school and begin to face what comes next. There are romances, a complicated affair between Sonny and the much older Ruth Popper, the wife of his football coach, and a slow drift apart between Sonny and Duane over the same beautiful, restless girl. McMurtry writes about adolescent sex and disappointment with an honesty that shocked some readers in 1966, and the small town adults around the teenagers are rendered with the same lack of sentimentality.

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 black and white film adaptation, written with McMurtry, became a classic in its own right and brought new readers to the novel. Both versions share a melancholy that stays with you long after the story ends. McMurtry would return to Thalia and its characters in later books like Texasville and Duane’s Depressed, building one of the great fictional small towns in American literature.

For readers new to McMurtry, this is a strong place to start. The prose is plain, the emotional intelligence is high, and the sense of place is unforgettable. Lonesome Dove may be the more famous McMurtry, but The Last Picture Show is the book that announced his major talent.