The Last Picture ShowThe Last Picture Show

"Set in the early 1950s in Thalia, a speck of a town in northwest Texas, Larry McMurtry's classic coming-of-age story, first published in 1966, memorializes the lives of the sexually charged teenagers and jaded adults who struggle to maintain their footing in a world that seems to have passed them by. Sonny Crawford and his best friend, Duane Moore, are seniors on the high school's pathetic football team. Duane's big problem is that he wants to marry his gorgeous but still inexperienced girlfriend, Jacy, the daughter of the town's richest couple, who disapprove of the relationship. Sonny also pines away for Jacy, who wants nothing more than to flee the stultification of the inbred town, where the biggest event seems to be a square dance at Christmas. McMurtry poignantly juxtaposes the lives of these randy teenagers with an older generation that cannot accept the onslaught of change, among them the spinster-like Miss Mosey, who struggles to keep the town's one movie house afloat, and Ruth Popper, the forlorn wife of the closeted football coach, whose desperation leads her to shatter the proprieties of a good Christian town. In depicting the small-town denizens of mid-twentieth-century America during the Korean War with a level of pathos not seen in any other contemporary American novel, McMurtry succeeded in immortalizing the hardscrabble lives of a post-World War II generation. In doing so, he created a new genre of fiction that portrayed the grandchildren of the pioneers of the Old West, not as they were stereotyped in mythic Hollywood films but as they actually lived. . ."--Book jacket.