"But Archer City never became the literary destination that he’d hoped, and his store, Booked Up, struggled financially...."

"McMurtry had followed the family tradition after all, lashing himself to a dying industry and getting his heart broken in the process. After his death, the Texas legislature passed a resolution honoring his memory; two years later, a state representative said that schools 'might need to ban 'Lonesome Dove"' for being too sexually explicit."

Writes Rachel Monroe, in "How Larry McMurtry Defined and Undermined the Idea of Texas/The 'Lonesome Dove' author’s great subject was the mismatch between the glamorized West and the grimmer reality." (The New Yorker).

McMurtry can seem like a figure from another era.... He wrote about a Texas that was majority white, with agrarian roots and a preoccupation with its pioneer past. The version of the state... no longer feels so central—there are plenty of other Texas stories to tell.... 

Last year, the Archer County News reported that Booked Up had been purchased by another Texas celebrity: Chip Gaines, the telegenically scruffy co-star of “Fixer Upper,” the home-renovation show that’s been credited (or blamed) for the spread of the “farmhouse chic” aesthetic. Gaines... said that he and his wife had gone through McMurtry’s collection and, with an eye for beautiful bindings, picked out books to be showcased in a new hotel that they’re opening in Waco this fall....

Gaines told me that he identified with McMurtry’s late-in-life return to small-town Texas. “He chose to go back to his roots, back to simple beginnings,” he said. “I just hope I make him proud."