For much of the 20th century, the Western was America's dominant literary and cinematic mythology. Beginning with Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), the genre codified a vision of the frontier as a proving ground for rugged individualism, moral clarity, and national destiny. Zane Grey, whose novels sold over 40 million copies between 1910 and 1940, extended this tradition by romanticizing the cowboy as a figure of stoic virtue set against sublime landscapes in works like his seminal Western Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) (Pauly, Thomas H. Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women. University of Illinois Press, 2005). These narratives served a dual ideological function in the United States: They retroactively justified westward expansion while providing Americans with a narrative of earned greatness that elided the violence of Indigenous displacement and the economic exploitation of the frontier.

This mythmaking persisted through midcentury, reinforced by Hollywood's golden-age Westerns and by World War II's apparent confirmation that American force could serve righteous ends. The war lent moral credibility to narratives of necessary violence, and postwar Westerns like Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949) translated that confidence onto the American West. However, the Korean War (1950-1953), which ended in stalemate and public ambivalence, began to erode Americans’ belief in the genre's moral certainties. As the historian Richard Slotkin argues in Gunfighter Nation (1992), Korea introduced the unsettling possibility that American military action could be inconclusive and morally ambiguous, destabilizing the good and evil binary and triumphalist narrative the Western had long reinforced (Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).

By the early 1960s, a generation of writers began dismantling the genre from within. Edward Abbey's The Brave Cowboy (1956) portrayed the cowboy as an anachronism crushed by modernity, while Thomas Berger's Little Big Man (1964) used dark comedy to expose the reality behind the mythology of Custer and the Indian Wars. John Williams's Butcher's Crossing (1960) systematically dismantled the idea of the frontier as a space of renewal and growth, depicting a buffalo hunt that descends into pointless brutality and ecological ruin rather than heroic conquest.

Larry McMurtry, raised in Archer City, Texas, and steeped in generations of his family’s ranching culture, was uniquely positioned to contribute. In his 1968 essay collection In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas, McMurtry argued that the cowboy myth only grew more powerful as actual cowboys disappeared. He urged Texas writers to move beyond nostalgia for an unrealistic version of frontier history and confront the diminished, unglamorous reality of the modern rural West. He delved into his personal experiences growing up in a small Texas town to offer his own revision to mythologies of the American West with his first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961).

McMurtry’s third novel, The Last Picture Show, appeared in 1966, the same year that Cormac McCarthy published The Orchard Keeper and two years before Charles Portis's True Grit (1968) reenvisioned frontier narrative through the ironic, self-aware voice of Mattie Hart. McCarthy would go on to produce one of the genre's definitive revisionist texts, Blood Meridian (1985), a novel whose apocalyptic violence owes something to McMurtry's earlier insistence on stripping the West of its romance. Annie Proulx, who wrote the introduction to McMurtry's Thalia Trilogy reissue, similarly channeled revisionist impulses in stories like “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), depicting western landscapes as sites of economic hardship and thwarted desire rather than mythic possibility. Together, these writers transformed the Western from a celebration of the myth of American exceptionalism into a literature of disenchantment.