The Last Picture Show was published by the Dial Press in 1966. Thalia, Texas — a fictionalized version of McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City — is a town that is dying by inches. The picture show is closing. The pool hall will follow. The cafes serve bad food to fewer customers each year. The young people who grow up here have two choices: leave or stay and become their parents.
Sonny Crawford and Duane Moore are seniors in high school, best friends, and co-captains of the worst football team in West Texas. The novel follows them through their last year of school and into the terrifying blankness that follows. Sonny has an affair with Ruth Popper, the football coach’s depressed wife — a relationship that is tender, guilty, and ultimately abandoned when Sonny loses his nerve. Duane pursues Jacy Farrow, the richest girl in town, whose mother Lois is conducting her own affairs with a weary sophistication that masks despair. The town’s moral center is Sam the Lion, who owns the pool hall, the café, and the picture show, and whose death midway through the novel removes the last person who remembers what Thalia was and might have been.
The Film
Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 adaptation is one of the finest American films of its decade. Shot in black and white in Archer City itself, with a cast that included Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, and Ellen Burstyn, the film won Academy Awards for Johnson (Best Supporting Actor) and Leachman (Best Supporting Actress). Bogdanovich understood what Hollywood had missed with Hud: the story is not about rebellion or glamour but about loss, limitation, and the quiet catastrophe of ordinary lives in a place that history has passed by.
McMurtry’s relationship with the film was complicated. He admired it but resented that it overshadowed the novel, and he was uncomfortable with the way Archer City became a tourist destination for people who wanted to see “the last picture show.” The Royal Theater in Archer City, which had closed in 1965, was eventually reopened — partly because of the film’s fame.
Thalia as American Archetype
McMurtry’s Thalia belongs to a tradition of fictional small towns — Winesburg, Ohio; Gopher Prairie; Yoknapatawpha County — that serve as laboratories for examining American life at its most exposed. But McMurtry’s town is distinguished by its absolute flatness, both physical and metaphorical. There are no hills, no forests, no rivers — nothing to break the wind or the monotony. The landscape is a character: relentless, indifferent, beautiful only to those who have learned to see beauty in emptiness.
The novel’s power comes from McMurtry’s refusal to offer escape. Sonny does not leave Thalia — he is not brave enough, not talented enough, not desperate enough. He stays, and the novel’s final image — Sonny sitting in Ruth Popper’s kitchen, having returned to the affair he abandoned, holding her hand while she cries — is devastating precisely because it offers neither resolution nor hope, only the terrible comfort of human connection in a place where nothing else is left.
Collecting The Last Picture Show
First edition (Dial Press, New York, 1966): Cloth binding in black. Dust jacket in predominantly gray/white tones.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $800–$2,000
- Very good/very good: $300–$700
- Good/no jacket: $50–$150
- Signed: $1,500–$3,500