Adventures with a Texas Humanist

For the first half of the twentieth century, Texas literature, culture, and folklore were dominated by J. Frank Dobie, the man Lon Tinkle called “Mr. Texas.” Dobie’s Texas was a land of exuberance and romance, a time when Texas was proud of itself and not loath to let the world know it.

But the culture of the state changed in the 1960s, and the figure who replaced Dobie as the dominant Texas writer and literary icon was Larry McMurtry. The Texas of Larry McMurtry is a far different landscap...