Twenty years ago Larry McMurtry, the preeminent chronicler of Texas, was estranged and far removed from the state. He had moved in 1969 to Washington, D.C., and opened a rare-book shop. With his son, James, he lived in a pretty little town across the border in Virginia and kept a small apartment above the store. He wrote that he returned one summer to see if he still “knew or felt anything about Texas”—and essentially decided, Nope.Yet McMurtry had made his early mark with books that elegized that most revered Texas icon, the working cowboy. He knew the life firsthand. His grandfather began ranching Archer County’s bluestem prairie soon after the defeat of the Comanche and Kiowa made that practical. Most of the patriarch’s twelve children scattered…The post Return of the Native Son appeared first on Texas Monthly.