It would help if Frye explained his criteria for the works he included or ignored to understand McMurtry as a writer requires knowing about his failures and weaknesses as well. But he also provides no commentary on McMurtry’s three late memoirs- Books, Literary Life, and Hollywood-that offer great insight into McMurtry’s life and work. Among the unmentioned (and probably unmentionable) are Boone’s Lick, Loop Group, Telegraph Days, The Last Kind Words Saloon, When the Light Goes, Rhino Ranch, Custer, and Crazy Horse. Despite the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series format that generally includes a thorough overview of a writer’s work, Frye chooses simply to leave out many McMurtry books. To do justice to Larry McMurtry’s forty-five plus novels, memoirs, and nonfiction works in 119 pages of prose is a daunting task. Steven Frye undertakes either an ambitious project or a fool’s errand in his brief survey of the life and work of arguably Texas’s best known writer.

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