Larry L. King, Texan Author and Playwright, Dies at 83

Larry L. King, a journalist, essayist and playwright with a swaggering prose style and a rollicking personal one, who left Texas as a young man but never abandoned it in his work — turning out profiles of politicians, articles on the flaws and foibles of American culture, searching autobiographical essays and, most famously, the book for the Broadway musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” — died on Thursday in Washington. He was 83.

Larry L. King was a prolific writer for Texas Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy and other magazines.

Universal City Studios

Dolly Parton and Robert Mandan in the 1982 film version of Mr. King’s musical, “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”

The cause was emphysema, his wife, Barbara Blaine, said.

A prolific writer for Texas Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy and other magazines, Mr. King had a big personality suffused with humor, characteristics evident in his work. Critics often noted his affinity for the wordplay, wry attitude and joy in the existence of scalawags that were hallmarks of Mark Twain. Nor was he, like Twain, loath to cast aspersions on the dull, the self-righteous and the oafish.

“There are ‘good’ people, yes, who might properly answer to the appellation ‘redneck,’ ” he wrote in Texas Monthly in 1974, “people who operate Mom-and-Pop stores or their lathes, dutifully pay their taxes, lend a helping hand to neighbors, love their country and their God and their dogs. But even among a high percentage of these salts-of-the-earth lives a terrible reluctance toward even modest passes at social justice, a suspicious regard of the mind as an instrument of worth, a view of the world extending little further than the ends of their own noses and only a vague notion that they are small quills writing a large history.”

“The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” written with Peter Masterson, was based on an article Mr. King wrote for Playboy about the closing of the Chicken Ranch, a brothel near La Grange, southeast of Austin, that operated illegally for decades with the tacit approval of the local authorities. With music and lyrics by Carol Hall and choreography by Tommy Tune, the show, which opened on Broadway in 1978, had a winking, naughty spirit that caught on, and in spite of less than stellar reviews, ran for four years, more than 1,500 performances.

Mr. King ranged widely in his books. “The One-Eyed Man” is a mid-1960s novel about the struggle to integrate a southern university. “In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor” (2006), is an account of his friendship with Morris, who as editor of Harper’s in the late 1960s gave Mr. King his first national exposure as a writer. “Confessions of a White Racist” (1971) is a startling autobiographical work about the impossibility of expunging the racial bias ingrained in him as a boy and the complicity of every white American in the maintenance of the status quo. It was nominated for a National Book Award.

“The town where I was born discouraged Negro residents,” Mr. King wrote in “Confessions.” “I was 15 before moving to where the black man was even statistically visible. The citizens of our little town willingly fed most depression hoboes who hopped off freights on the Texas & Pacific to beg food at our back doors. When an infrequent black hobo appeared, however, he was driven away with outraged oaths and threats to call the constable.”

Lawrence Leo King was born on Jan. 1, 1929, in west Texas, in the town of Putnam, “kind of near Abilene, but not really near anything,” his wife, Ms. Blaine, said. He grew up mostly on a rural farm until his family moved to Midland, where he went to high school. His mother, Cora Lee Clark, read Twain to him as a boy. His father, Clyde Clayton King, was a farmer and a blacksmith and the subject of one of his son’s best-known essays, “The Old Man.”

Young Larry never graduated from high school; he left to join the Army just after World War II and served most of his stint in the New York area making training films. When he got out, he got his first writing job at The Hobbs Daily Flare, a New Mexico newspaper, and later briefly attended Texas Technological College, now Texas Tech University, in Lubbock.

In the mid-1950s he moved to Washington as an aide to a Texas congressman, J. T. Rutherford. Later he joined the staff of another Texas representative, Jim Wright, the future speaker of the House. He left in 1964 to become a full-time writer. In spite of his lack of formal education, he was granted a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard for the 1969-70 academic year and wrote about it for Harper’s in an essay called “Blowing My Mind at Harvard.”

“The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” was made into a 1982 film starring Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton, and a sequel to the stage musical, “The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public,” appeared briefly on Broadway in 1994. 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com