Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry (1961) — McMurtry's debut novel, set on a ranch in the Texas Panhandle, captures the hardscrabble cattle country around Amarillo with an unsentimental honesty that defined his career. It was adapted into the film Hud.
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985) — The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of a cattle drive from South Texas to Montana begins in McMurtry's Panhandle country. The novel's portrait of the land, the men who worked it, and the end of the open range era is the definitive fictional account of this part of Texas.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) — Not set in Amarillo specifically, but McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel was inspired in part by a night in Amarillo, where he looked out at the dark plains and imagined a burned future landscape. The flatness and the emptiness of the Panhandle are present throughout.
Prairie Fever: A Texas Panhandle Novel — The regional history shelves at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum bookshop carry a good selection of titles on the Comanche, the buffalo hunters, the early ranchers, and the Dust Bowl years that shaped this corner of the Great Plains.