McMurtry wrote the book after visiting Las Vegas to research a film script about that city.
[3] McMurtry always had a great deal of affection for the book saying that he suffered "a literary gloom that lasted from 1975 until 1983, when the miracle of The Desert Rose snapped me out of it.
The Desert Rose, for example, was written at a time when there was a shift in taste in Las Vegas, away from the big-bosomed showgirls.
Small-breasted dancers came to be preferred, and Harmony, my showgirl, was out of a job, like the cowboys in my other fiction.
In 1986, Rob Cohen of Taft-Barish Productions hired Terrence Malick to adapt the novel into a screenplay for Barry Levinson to direct.