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.
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 .