The Last Picture Show - Hardcover

McMurtry, Larry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671676040 ISBN 13: 9780671676049

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1989

Synopsis

Fans of this Pulitzer Prize-winning author will want to read the book that started his bestselling tradition--a tradition repsonsible for the sale of over 9 million books. This most memorable of McMurtry's novels, set in a sleepy Texas town, tells of teenagers taking the final steps from childhood to adulthood.

About this title

Review:

In The Last Picture Show Larry McMurtry introduced characters who would show up again in later novels, Texasville and Duane's Depressed. This first volume of the trilogy drops the reader into the one-stoplight town of Thalia, Texas, where Duane Moore, his buddy Sonny, and his girlfriend Jacy are all stumbling along the rocky road to adulthood. Duane wants nothing more than to marry Jacy; Sonny wants what Duane has; and Jacy wants to get the hell out of Thalia any way she can. This is not a novel of big ideas or defining moments; over the course of a year Duane and Jacy make up and break up, Sonny begins an affair with his high-school football coach's wife, and the only movie house in town closes its doors forever. Yet it is out of these small-town experiences--a nude swimming party in Wichita, a failed sexual encounter during a senior trip, a botched elopement, an enlistment--that McMurtry builds his tale and reveals his characters' hearts. No epiphanies here, just a lot of hard-won experience that leaves none of his protagonists particularly wiser, though they're all a little sadder by the end. --Alix Wilber

From the Publisher:

6 1.5-hour cassettes

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0671676040
• ISBN 13: 9780671676049
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288