Recommendations
Books Like The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry
For readers of the great small-town Texas elegy
If you loved The Last Picture Show — Sonny and Duane's senior year in dying Anarene, Texas, the closing of the movie theater, Sam the Lion's death, the community's dissolution — these novels share the same project: the portrait of American small-town life in decline, treated without sentimentality.
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Buy on AmazonWinesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
Anderson's linked stories — the most important predecessor in American small-town fiction; the Winesburg grotesques and their trapped lives are the Midwestern version of the Anarene characters; The Last Picture Show is McMurtry's Texas Winesburg, Ohio; the foundational text for the tradition.
- 2
Buy on AmazonMain Street
by Sinclair Lewis
Lewis's great small-town novel — Carol Kennicott's Gopher Prairie is the Midwestern version of Anarene, both novels about the spiritual and cultural poverty of small-town American life; the companion in the American tradition of the small-town-as-trap.
- 3
Buy on AmazonRevolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Yates's great novel about suburban American dreams and the failure to escape — the Wheelers' Connecticut suburb is the metropolitan version of what Anarene is in the small-town mode; the companion in American fiction about the spiritual poverty of ordinary life.
- 4
Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece — the companion in his Texas fiction; where The Last Picture Show is small-town Texas decline, Lonesome Dove is frontier Texas adventure; the two novels define the poles of McMurtry's Texas world.
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Buy on AmazonTerms of Endearment
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's companion novel in his Texas-to-Houston mode — Aurora Greenway and Emma's relationship is the domestic, female-centered companion to the male friendship at the center of The Last Picture Show; the Houston domestic world is the urban successor to Anarene.
- 6
Buy on AmazonOrdinary People
by Judith Guest
Guest's debut novel about a family trying to function after a son's death — the Midwestern, more psychologically focused version of the emotional pressure that shapes small-town American life; the Jarrett family's breakdown is the suburban companion to Anarene's community dissolution.
- 7
Buy on AmazonA Death in the Family
by James Agee
Agee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a family in Knoxville after the sudden death of the father — the Southern version of the small-town American novel treated with lyrical intensity; the companion in American fiction about community and loss in a specific American place.
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Buy on AmazonThe Optimist's Daughter
by Eudora Welty
Welty's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — a woman returns to her Mississippi home when her father is dying; the Southern female version of what The Last Picture Show is doing in the Texas male mode; the companion in the tradition of American regional fiction about place and memory.
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