As much as I liked Lonesome Dove (and I did read the novel) The Last Picture Show is as good as To Kill A Mockingbird or anything by Faulkner.
Of course I am a Texas boy so I’m a bit biased in favor of novels set in Texas. Hud - by McMurtry is pretty darn good too
The question arises as to whether Texas writers are Southern writers. Of course, Texas was predominantly settled by Southerners and is culturally Southern, but the physical environment of the Lone Star State is very different from the older Southern states. West of Fort Worth and Austin lie the vast Great Plains, a very different landscape than the rest of the Confederacy. The Texas economy did not enter a 80-90 year slump as did the rest of the South following Appomattox. Cattle and oil, along with vast areas open to homesteading, led to a far stronger economy and great population growth from 1870 until 1930, even as the older South stagnated. Additionally, Texas was for the most part not a battleground between 1861 and 1865, and Union invasions were easily repelled. Generals like Sherman and Sheridan did not devastate the state, unlike Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. You also cannot discount the Central European and Hispanic influences, which, though mostly confined to Central and South Texas, are not found elsewhere in the South.
As a result, the effect of the Lost Cause and the pessimism engendered by decades of a stagnant economy were not factors in the Texas collective conscience, as they were in the pre-World War II South. Thus, the state's fiction writers did not reflect the same experience as those in the older South. Texas literature is related to Southern literature, but represents at least a subcategory, if not a separate one.