I guess this thread has died down, or maybe no one is interested in McMurtry. However, if you like western novels -- real western novels -- then McMurtry is for you.
I posted a while back that I was reading McM's 'The Berrybender Narratives' a four-volume series: Sin Killer, The Wandering Hill, By Sorrow's River, and Folly and Glory. These stories follow the Berrybenders, a family of querky British aristocrats and their retainers across down the Missouri River and across the great plains. Although McM brings humor to this family of eccentrics, he describes the beauty and brutality of the plains filled with dust storms, drought, Indian attacks, and cholrea.
In an interview with Planet Jackson Hole, Annie Proulx, discussing the screen writing of BBM, remarked I would likely have said no to any other screenwriter(s) who approached me on this story...I trusted them. especially Larry McMurtry, whose ear and eye for Western America is equaled by none. McM has proved himself many times over, especially with his sweeping 'Lonesome Dove' the Pulitizer prize winning novel, and many other stories set in the vast reaches of the American desert.
The 'Berrybender Narratives' should be read in order, since the narrative flow of the stories follows the character development as well as the description of the developing American west. McM includes a number of real-life historic figures, as well as an account of the Alamo.
In a review in the 'Book Reporter,' Joe Hartlaub writes, 'Folly and Glory' may well be the best of the Berrybender Narratives. McMurtry is perfect here, capturing the feeling of danger and casual brutality that was part of the everyday existence of the frontiersmen in the mid-19th century...[it] is, ultimately, the capstone of what may well be McMurtry's penultimate work in a career that has been marked by creative summits.
This is more than a 'western' -- it's a description of life the way it was lived in a harsh, unforgiving land filled with beauty and brutality. For those who like McM and accounts of early American western life, these stories are well worth reading.