lonesome dove book review new york times

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By Rachel Monroe

As a boy, Larry McMurtry rode Polecat, a Shetland pony with a mean streak and a habit of dragging him through mesquite thickets. The family ranch occupied a hard, dry, largely featureless corner of north-central Texas, and was perched on a rise known as Idiot Ridge. McMurtry’s three siblings appeared better adapted to their environment—one of his sisters was named rodeo queen; his brother cowboyed for a while—but Larry, the eldest, was afraid of shrubbery, and of poultry. His father, Jeff Mac, ran hundreds of cows, which he knew individually, by their markings; Larry’s eyesight was so poor that he had a hard time spotting a herd on the horizon. When his cowboy uncles were young, they sat on the roof of a barn and watched the last cattle drives set out on the long trek north. McMurtry lay under the ranch-house roof and listened to the hum of the highway, as eighteen-wheelers headed toward Fort Worth, Dallas, or beyond—anywhere bigger, and far away. Many years later, the London-born Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, a rodeo enthusiast, wore a Stetson and a bolo tie to his first meeting with McMurtry. He was surprised, and perhaps a bit disappointed, to find the young writer dressed “like a graduate student,” in slacks and a sports coat. “He did not share my enthusiasm for horses, either,” Korda recalled.

The mismatch between a glamorized West and the grimmer, starker reality was McMurtry’s great subject across the dozens of novels, nonfiction books, and screenplays that he wrote or co-wrote before his death, at eighty-four, in 2021, from congestive heart failure. In “Larry McMurtry: A Life,” a new biography by Tracy Daugherty, the author of well-received books about Joseph Heller, Joan Didion, and Donald Barthelme, McMurtry emerges as a perpetually ambivalent figure, one who eventually became a part of the mythology that he insisted he was attempting to dismantle.

Although McMurtry spent decades living in Washington, D.C., and Tucson, and wrote books set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, he was always conscious of himself as a Texas writer. It was an identity imposed from both without and within; some part of McMurtry always remained stuck on Idiot Ridge, looking out toward the horizon. In his early thirties, with a handful of novels to his name, he published an essay condemning the state of Texas letters as woefully backward. More than a decade later, he wrote another, even harsher assessment, claiming that “Texas has produced no major writers or major books.” But even McMurtry’s repudiations have a funny way of reaffirming Texas chauvinism. (“One must ask: What has Nevada done for literature lately? Who’s the Alaskan Tennyson?” Barthelme wrote, for Texas Monthly , in an archly mocking response to McMurtry’s later essay. “We’ve done at least as well as Rhode Island, we’re pushing Wyoming to the wall.”) With “Lonesome Dove,” the best-selling cattle-drive epic that won him a Pulitzer in 1986, McMurtry believed that he had written a book “permeated with criticism of the West from start to finish.” Instead, it reinvigorated the Western as a genre. Daugherty quotes the late Don Graham, who was a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin: “ ‘The Godfather’ was supposed to de-mythologize the mob, too, but we all wanted to be gangsters after we saw it, right?”

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McMurtry was born in 1936, into a way of life that was already on its way out. Small-scale cattle ranching was a dying industry, one that McMurtry missed out on “only by the width of a generation,” he wrote, and “as I was growing up, heard the whistle of its departure.” His father was a stoic man who thought that ice water was an indulgence; his mother, Hazel, was cripplingly fearful. The family was in thrall to Jeff Mac’s parents—among the first white people to settle in Archer County—who seemed to expect subsequent generations to double down on their sacrifice. From a young age, McMurtry sensed that this was a bad bargain. His uncles lived in broken bodies, sustaining themselves on remembered, or imagined, glory days—they were brilliant storytellers but also cautionary tales. Drought, urbanization, and oil were reshaping the Texas economy. Corporate operations were squeezing out small farms, and cowboys were moving to the suburbs. But being a McMurtry meant sticking with an enterprise long after it made sense. One uncle, debilitated by age and hard living, took to tying himself to his horse with baling wire—a “lunatic thing to do considering the roughness of the country and the temperament of most of the horses he rode,” McMurtry wrote. Any mourning for a lost era was tempered by McMurtry’s understanding that the good old days were never that good to begin with. His characters are often uneasy in the present moment, filled with a longing for something that they can’t quite name.

When McMurtry was a second grader, the family moved to Archer City, a one-stoplight town about eighteen miles from the ranch. In high school, he was an officer in the 4-H club, a trombone player in the band, and the third-tallest member of a basketball team that once lost a game 106–4. Even though he grew up in a largely bookless town, “reading very quickly came to seem what I was meant to do,” McMurtry wrote. The few books that he got his hands on assumed an almost totemic importance: Grosset & Dunlap pulps, inherited from a cousin going off to war; a truck-flattened history of the Creeks, found in the parking lot of a livestock auction. “I shall almost certainly make some weird combination of writer-rancher-professor out of myself,” he wrote in his application essay to North Texas State. He wasn’t yet twenty-one years old and had already amassed a library of six hundred volumes. (McMurtry’s collecting was not a purely intellectual enterprise; he eventually amassed enough vintage pornography to fill a small room.)

As a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, McMurtry supplemented his stipend by buying and selling used books; meanwhile, his friend and classmate Ken Kesey made extra money being dosed with LSD for scientific experiments. The sixties were kicking up, and McMurtry toggled between working on an anonymous radical publication and writing stories about stolid, repressed cattle ranchers. The youth culture in evidence in his early novels is distinctly Texan and rural (and white): Cadillacs and roughnecks, Hank Williams songs on the jukebox at the pool hall, aimless drives down empty streets. In McMurtry’s depictions of small-town America in the fifties, there’s little to be nostalgic for, apart from the jukeboxes—life is cramped and strangled, suffused with boredom that threatens to tip into menace. Violent impulses are enacted on women, animals, and weaker boys. In “The Last Picture Show,” from 1966, teen-agers gleefully rape a “skinny, quivering” blind heifer whose “frightened breath raised little puffs of dust from the sandy lot.” “To Mom and Daddy,” McMurtry wrote in a copy of the novel he sent to his parents. “You probably won’t like it. Love, Larry.”

McMurtry’s novels translated well to the movies, where the sweep of the settings helped to mute the stories’ cynicism. His first novel, “Horseman, Pass By” became “Hud,” starring a callous, smoldering Paul Newman; “The Last Picture Show,” according to Daugherty, sold nine hundred copies in hardcover upon its initial printing, but Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film became an immediate sensation, winning two Oscars. (The heifer-rape scene did not make it into the movie.) McMurtry’s home town was already wary of him, and the scandal-plagued filming of “The Last Picture Show” didn’t improve his local reputation. (Bogdanovich’s marriage to his wife and collaborator, Polly Platt, collapsed after he began an on-set affair with the film’s twenty-year-old star, Cybill Shepherd.) The Archer County News ran an angry letter about “the further degradation and decay of the morals and attitudes we foist upon our youth in this county”; according to Daugherty, McMurtry, incensed by such attacks, responded by challenging his fellow-citizens to a public debate about the town’s true nature. Around that time, he decided that the future of Texas, and Texas writing, was urban, and he went on to write a suite of novels featuring graduate students, entertaining but uneven books that swing from slapstick to pathos. McMurtry was particularly good at capturing the charms of Houston—steamy, dank, violent, fun.

When Daugherty told the art critic Dave Hickey that he was writing a book about McMurtry, Hickey replied, “Knowing Larry, it’s going to be a real episodic book.” McMurtry was an inveterate road tripper who collected friends like he collected books, and Daugherty’s biography is full of entertaining cameos: McMurtry hosts Kesey’s bus of zonked-out Merry Pranksters, dines on caviar with Susan Sontag, goes flea-market shopping with Diane Keaton, and attends a state dinner for Prince Charles and Princess Diana hosted by Ronald Reagan. But the anecdotes, many of them drawn from McMurtry’s own writing about his life, can feel like a shield. A deeper sense of McMurtry remains elusive throughout the biography; he comes across as a hard man to get to know well. (In “Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry,” edited by the writer George Getschow, the difficulty of approaching and engaging with McMurtry is a recurrent theme.)

McMurtry was often lauded for his skill at writing female characters, which seems to boil down to the simple fact that he found women interesting, and not merely in terms of their relationships with men. In McMurtry’s books, characters who don’t get what they want tend to have the richest interiority. His female characters, less able to force their environments to conform to their egos, tend to see the world more clearly. In “Terms of Endearment,” men are either underwhelming or comic. The novel is more interested in relationships among a constellation of women: Emma Horton, a young mother with unrealized literary ambitions; her friend Patsy; her vexing, charismatic mother, Aurora; and Aurora’s put-upon housekeeper, Rosie. When Emma is dying, Aurora and Patsy circle her hospital bed, discussing her children’s futures. Flap, Emma’s husband, “was there too,” but “he was not relevant.”

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McMurtry once wrote that the women he knew growing up had responded to men’s carelessness and indifference by retreating into a “mulish, resigned silence,” which he likened to “the muteness of an empty skillet, without resonance and without depth.” He emerged from this stifled environment with a real fondness for listening to women talk. After an early marriage and divorce, he embarked on a series of long-running, overlapping, ambiguously intimate friendships with a number of women, including Keaton and the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko; he managed to come away from the filming of “The Last Picture Show” close to both Platt and Shepherd. McMurtry spoke with his female friends regularly on the phone, wrote them letters, brought them flowers, and slept with some of them. Having raised his son, James, more or less on his own, he seemed to have an appreciation for single mothers. “He was, physically, one of the least attractive men imaginable, but as a friend he was everything I wanted,” Shepherd wrote in her memoir. “A renaissance cowboy, an earthy intellectual, a Pulitzer Prize winner who could take pleasure in a dive that served two-dollar tacos.”

Even as McMurtry urged other Texas writers to root their stories in the present, and in cities—“Why are there still cows to be milked and chickens to be fed in every other Texas book that comes along? When is enough going to be enough?”—he was working on his nineteenth-century cattle-drive epic. “Lonesome Dove” originated as an idea for a screenplay, tossed around by Bogdanovich and McMurtry after the success of “The Last Picture Show.” The plan was to cast John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda in a story about aging cowboys. “I said it needed to be a trek: They start somewhere, they go somewhere,” Bogdanovich recalled, years later. “He said we might as well start at the Rio Grande and go north.” One of the characters would be called Augustus, they decided, because they enjoyed imagining how Stewart would pronounce the name. The film never worked out; according to McMurtry, Stewart and Fonda weren’t keen on their last cowboy movie being “a dim moral victory.”

A decade later, McMurtry repurposed the material into a novel about a group of men, led by the ex-Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, who become the first people to drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana. The cattle drive proved to be an ideal subject for McMurtry. Though he never seemed much interested in plot architecture, he was an excellent writer of episodes; along the trail, the Hat Creek outfit is beset by locusts, bandits, and all manner of weather. Years earlier, McMurtry’s novel “All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers” had portrayed a pair of Texas Rangers as violent buffoons. In “Lonesome Dove,” Call and McCrae are essentially noble, if emotionally stunted.

Despite McMurtry’s evident affection for the characters, there’s a pervasive sense of something sour about their quest. In the novel’s first major set piece, the crew carries out a nighttime raid across the Rio Grande into Mexico to steal a herd of horses to take on the northward journey. “Evidently, if you crossed the river to do it, it stopped being a crime and became a game,” a teen-age apprentice learns; the more seasoned hands accept the robbery as a matter of course. This initial crime echoes a more shameful and consequential theft that reverberates throughout the novel: white settlers’ expropriation of the Great Plains and the attempted eradication of their Indigenous inhabitants. The novel is haunted by the aftereffects of those actions: a small band of starving Native Americans, slaughtering horses for food; an old man with a dirty beard pushing a wheelbarrow of buffalo bones across the high plains. Viewed from the ground, the cattle drive is thrilling, but seen from any greater distance it’s devastating. McCrae, the novel’s romantic cynic, periodically lays bare what all the episodic heroism has been for: “That’s what we done, you know. Kilt the dern Indians so they wouldn’t bother the bankers.” McMurtry well knew the ecological devastation wrought by the expansion of the cattle industry, and the fact that it contained the seeds of its own collapse. Overgrazing degraded the rangelands, and mesquite and creosote bushes crowded out native grasses. Just a few generations after the events of “Lonesome Dove,” McMurtry’s father was embroiled in an endless, futile war to eradicate mesquite from his ranch. “We killed the right animal, the buffalo, and brought in the wrong animal, wetland cattle. And it didn’t work,” McMurtry said in 2010.

“Lonesome Dove” is a deeply ambivalent book, though, to McMurtry’s chagrin, it wasn’t always recognized as such. Adapted into a beloved 1989 miniseries, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as McCrae and Call, it further established the ex-Rangers as sentimental heroes. McMurtry began comparing his most popular book to “Gone with the Wind”; he didn’t mean it as a compliment. Still, he went on to write sequels and prequels, spinning out an extended universe that was, on the whole, more rote and less complex than the original.

For all his mixed feelings about “Lonesome Dove,” McMurtry appreciated the rewards that the book and other projects brought him. “Movie money is just the kind of unreal money I like to spend,” he once wrote to his agent. On road trips, in rented Cadillacs, he sent his dirty clothes home via FedEx; he became such a regular at Petrossian, the caviar spot in midtown Manhattan, that the restaurant installed a brass plaque with his name at his favorite table. But his biggest indulgence was books. As independent bookstores across the country closed, McMurtry bought up their stock and moved it to Archer City, where he was busy converting downtown buildings into bookstores. “Leaving a million or so in Archer City is as good a legacy as I can think of for that region and indeed for the West,” McMurtry wrote. The town, having endured a major oil bust, was at last ready to embrace its wayward son. Visitors to Archer City could now stay at the Lonesome Dove Inn and pay their respects to a small McMurtry shrine at the Dairy Queen. When Sontag came to visit, she told McMurtry that it seemed as though he was living inside his own theme park.

The final third of Daugherty’s book makes for bleak reading. McMurtry had a heart attack in 1991, and quadruple-bypass surgery left him feeling “largely posthumous,” as he put it, a condition from which he seems to have never fully recovered. His closest partnership around this time was with Diana Ossana, a Tucson paralegal. Daugherty is never quite able to explain the nature of their relationship—was she his girlfriend, his friend, his writing partner, his manager, or some combination of all four? Whatever their dynamic, Ossana was a key source of support. During the worst of his post-surgery years, a period when McMurtry was suffering from depression, he lived with her. For a while, he still approached writing as if it were farm chores, something to be tackled first thing in the morning, seven days a week, without fail. But after the publication of “Streets of Laredo,” in 1993, he stopped. Ossana eventually coaxed him back to the typewriter, and soon she was editing, and sometimes rewriting, his work. In 2011, McMurtry married Faye Kesey, Ken’s widow, after a six-week courtship; the couple lived with Ossana, an arrangement that apparently suited everyone well enough.

In 2006, McMurtry and Ossana won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay for adapting Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”; McMurtry thanked his typewriter in his acceptance speech. At the Oscars, to which he wore bluejeans and boots, he thanked “all the booksellers of the world.” But Archer City never became the literary destination that he’d hoped, and his store, Booked Up, struggled financially. In 2012, McMurtry auctioned off hundreds of thousands of books. “This was his dream, to turn Archer City into a book town,” Getschow, a friend of McMurtry’s, said at the time. “Now this is the end of the dream. There is just no way around it.” McMurtry had followed the family tradition after all, lashing himself to a dying industry and getting his heart broken in the process. After his death, the Texas legislature passed a resolution honoring his memory; two years later, a state representative said that schools “might need to ban ‘Lonesome Dove’ ” for being too sexually explicit.

McMurtry can seem like a figure from another era. He came of age in a literary economy that allowed for the slow building of a career. Until the breakout success of “Lonesome Dove,” he described himself, with characteristic understatement, as a “midlist writer” and a “minor regional novelist.” (A friend once had those words emblazoned on a T-shirt for him.) He wrote about a Texas that was majority white, with agrarian roots and a preoccupation with its pioneer past. The version of the state which had such a hold on McMurtry, the one he alternately rebelled against and embraced, no longer feels so central—there are plenty of other Texas stories to tell. (For another take on the rollicking nineteenth-century epic, try “Texas: The Great Theft,” by Carmen Boullosa.)

Last year, the Archer County News reported that Booked Up had been purchased by another Texas celebrity: Chip Gaines, the telegenically scruffy co-star of “Fixer Upper,” the home-renovation show that’s been credited (or blamed) for the spread of the “farmhouse chic” aesthetic. Gaines, who spent summers as a child in Archer City, said that he and his wife had gone through McMurtry’s collection and, with an eye for beautiful bindings, picked out books to be showcased in a new hotel that they’re opening in Waco this fall; the fate of the others is unclear, but the couple say that they plan to donate a large portion back to Archer City. Gaines told me that he identified with McMurtry’s late-in-life return to small-town Texas. “He chose to go back to his roots, back to simple beginnings,” he said. “I just hope I make him proud.” ♦

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Geoff Dyer: ‘Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is like the gift of reading itself’

The author and critic on ‘total bore’ Saul Bellow, how Nietzsche changed his mind, and laughing and crying over Jean Rhys

The book I am currently reading I’m in the rereading phase of my life. Just finished Shirley Hazzard ’s The Transit of Venus for the third time. Quite something, to be freshly overwhelmed by the greatness of a book you’ve read twice before: every page, every paragraph, every sentence.

The book that changed my life A play in the form of a book in the form of a record, to be precise: Shakespeare’s Richard III. We were doing it for O-level. A woman my mum worked with at my old junior school liked Shakespeare and had an LP of an edited version of the play with one of those Hammer horror actors, Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee (I forget which), as Richard. She lent it to me and that, combined with the lessons by a wonderful teacher at grammar school, led to my becoming swallowed up in the currents and eddies of language. I still know huge chunks of the play off by heart. The nice thing about this story is that my mum and her friend weren’t teachers at the school; they both worked in the canteen as dinner ladies. It reminds me of that Play for Today from about the same time, Shakespeare or Bust.

The book I wish I’d written Impossible to answer honestly except by saying “None”. Naturally, I often find myself wishing that one of my poxy books had sold as many copies as an even poxier one by someone else but, as Walt Whitman put it: “I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.”

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing John Berger , without a doubt, but I can’t narrow it down to a single book since the influence was, precisely, his range and endless formal innovation. Berger’s influence was so strong it actually took me a while, along with multiple transfusions and organ transplants from other writers, to become myself.

The book I think is most under rated In 2001 I was a judge for a prize and we shortlisted The Name of the World by Denis Johnson . The other two judges wanted Philip Roth to win for The Human Stain but I persuaded them to give it to Michael Ondaatje for Anil’s Ghost . Looking back I wish we’d chosen The Name of the World in recognition of the unfettered wonder of Johnson’s vision but I think we all felt that to give a biennial prize to a 120-page book reflected rather poorly on the state of literary production, that something more substantial was needed: bit daft, really, since genius can’t be measured .

The book I think is most over rated The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow . Both a total bore and an interesting example of the influencer being so much less interesting than the influencee, Martin Amis .

The book that changed my mind The Gay Science by Nietzsche . I suppose it was my mind that was changed but it felt as if it was the world that changed.

The last book that made me cry Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys , which I recently reread.

The last book that made me laugh Voyage in the Dark . The point being that a book has to do both, ideally at the same time, in the same sentence even. Like the time when we hear that the protagonist, Anna, sent “a postcard from Blackpool or some such place and all she said on it was, ‘This is a very windy place,’ which doesn’t tell us much about how she is getting on.” God, I love Jean Rhys. And just today I was reading some stories in The Visiting Privilege by the aptly named Joy Williams. As one of her characters rightly concludes, “Things had to be funny.” They do indeed.

The book I couldn’t finish Água Viva by Clarice Lispector. No small achievement since it’s only about 80 pages long but I somehow managed to tear myself away with plenty of time to spare.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read I’ve failed to read all the usual ones – Proust, late James, Musil – but nope, no shame.

The book I give as a gift Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry . It’s like the gift of reading itself.

My earliest reading memory Beatrix Potter while I was in hospital having my tonsils and adenoids out. (Do they still do that? Seems like they just whipped ’em out without so much as a by-your-leave back in the 60s.)

My comfort read David Thomson ’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. An inexhaustibly wonderful cosmology.

• Books that made me
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LONESOME DOVE

A novel (simon & schuster classics).

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

GENERAL FICTION

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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by Hanya Yanagihara

FIREFLY LANE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008

Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...

Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest ( Magic Hour , 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.

Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today -like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3

Page Count: 496

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007

GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

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How Lonesome Dove Rekindled My Love for Storytelling

I picked up Lonesome Dove after reading a New York Times Book Review on the newly published Larry McMurtry biography by Tracy Daughtery.

McMurtry died on March 25, 2021, at eighty-four years old. One of the reviewer’s comments from the biography’s introduction captured me. It said Larry McMurtry was a writer in the truest sense. You can be sure he would be writing if he had any free time in his daily life. Writing was his default. Writing was his joy. He was a storyteller who told his stories by writing them down. 

This review spoke of his first and most famous book, Lonesome Dove , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. He also wrote The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment.

Despite McMurtry’s accolades, I didn’t start reading Lonesome Dove . I hesitated because of its sheer size. The Kindle version has 946 pages. I rarely stay interested in a book for that long. Then I read that McMurtry grew up in south Texas near the Mexico border, which gave him cowboy cred.

I decided to go for it. I downloaded it to my Kindle and told Kathy. She said, “I read that book over forty years ago. I loved it. I want to reread it. We can talk about it.” Now I was all in.

This book moves at the pace of a cattle drive. A cattle drive that lasts three thousand miles. Now, you might think that sounds boring. The truth is, the characters are so good, and the situations they get into are so interesting I didn’t want the cattle drive to end. I just wanted to continue being with these men and women. 

When one of my favorite characters died unexpectedly, I mourned him. I was sad that whole day despite being on a Caribbean cruise. That’s how real these people, these fictional characters, were to me.

I found myself continually asking the question, “How can this author know people so well?”

Here are a few quotes on the author’s insights into people.

“I figured out something, Lorie,” he said. “I figured out why you and me get along so well. You know more than you say, and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.”

“If we shoot him, we’ll have Gus for a cook,” Call said. “In that case, we’ll have to eat, talk, or else starve to death listening.”

He did not like travel—the thought of it made him unhappy. And yet, when he went home to Mexico, he felt unhappy too, for his wife was disappointed in him and let him know it every day. He had never been sure what she wanted—after all, their children were beautiful—but whatever it was, he had not been able to give it to her. His daughters were his delight, but they would soon all marry and be gone, leaving him no protection from his wife. 

A sentence like this...

“He grew lonely and could not remember who he had been.”

I was always drawn to the romance of the cowboy way. It was a simpler time in our country’s history. It was a time of clear right and wrong, quick justice, survival, and the search for a better life.

Lonesome Dove captures the spirit of this history.

It is the best fiction book I ever read. I highly recommend it. The time you spend will be entertaining. And in the end, you’ll have met and spent time with some great cowboys.

Have you ever been so deeply connected to a book? If so, which one? Comment on LinkedIn.

Ready for more?

Nick Wisseman

Author and barn hand.

Latest Release: Colors and Ghosts

Drafting: Excavating Armageddon

• Nov 14, 2020

Book Review: Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove starts with pigs and ends with sorrow. In between lies one of the best books I’ve read.

The novel is set in the American West after the Civil War. The protagonists, Woodrow Call and Augustus “Gus” McCrae, are former Texas Rangers who retired a decade ago and spent the intervening years in the little Texas town of Lonesome Dove. Nominally, they run the Hat Creek Cattle Company with a few of their old comrades (and two blue pigs, who kick off the book by eating a snake). But mostly they’re just whiling away the hours.

This part of the story is easy, pleasurable reading. McMurtry writes in third-person omniscient, meandering from one character to the next and bringing them to life quickly and completely. Call is a workaholic prone to brooding. (“Give Call a grievance,” we hear early on, “however silly, and he would save it like money.”) Gus is voluble and lazy. Pea Eye is simple but solid. Deets is as reliable as he is quirky (he makes his pants out of quilts). Newt is young and desperate to please.

Even minor characters get distinctive traits. Lippy “was so named because his lower lip was about the size of the flap on a saddlebag. He could tuck enough snuff under it to last a normal person at least a month; in general the lip lived a life of its own, there toward the bottom of his face. Even when he was just sitting quietly, studying his cards, the lip waved and wiggled as if it had a breeze blowing across it.” And Joe “had a habit of staring straight ahead. Though Call assumed he had a neck joint like other men, he had never seen him use it.”

For a while, it seems like the Hat Creek crew might putter around Lonesome Dove forever. Then Jake, another ex-ranger—on the run from the law, as it happens—rides into town and mentions that he’s been to Montana and seen vast tracts of good, unsettled land there. This lights a fire under Call. He spurs the boys into motion, leading them on cattle raids across the Mexican border and hiring extra hands to help drive the animals north. So begins a great, three-thousand-mile trek from some of the lowest latitudes of the country to the highest.

Things get hairy almost immediately. Death comes fast on the drive, and the dangers are too varied to guard against: snake-plagued river crossings, lightning storms on the open plains, searing droughts, and worse. Likable characters are abused and killed. Some of your favorites won’t make it. Prepare to be heartbroken.

Yet there’s no grand goal here. Call and Gus aren’t trying to open up the American West—they already served their time protecting settlers along the shifting frontier. Montana is a vague destination, not a mission; Call essentially leaves Lonesome Dove on a whim. Gus goes along for lack of anything better to do, but not eagerly. “Here you’ve brought these cattle all this way,” he complains to his partner around the halfway mark, “with all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you don’t have no reason in this world to be doing it.”

McMurtry has plenty of reasons for the drive, though. In his preface to the 25th-anniversary edition of Lonesome Dove , he argues that “the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity,” namely Newt’s. His mother is long dead, and his father might be one of the Rangers.

But that wasn’t the thread that stood out most to me. The book is filled with restless souls regretting all sorts of errors. Gus wishes he’d married his sweetheart when he had the chance. “I expect it was the major mistake of my life, letting her slip by,” he tells Call. For his part, the quieter man laments getting involved with women at all. Jake can’t believe he’s committed hanging crimes. July Johnson, the Kansas sheriff pursuing Jake, hates himself for leaving three of his charges to face a murderer. And so on.

Aging is the through-line here—aging and change. Gus and Call are past their primes. They were legendary Rangers once, but now they’re fading into irrelevancy. The younger generation doesn’t hold them in the same esteem. “I guess they forgot us, like they forgot the Alamo,” August observes after the owner of a bar tries to kick him out for demanding respectful treatment. “Why wouldn’t they?” Call answers. “We ain’t been around.”

The West is moving on too. The buffalo are nearly done, pushed to the brink of extinction by wasteful hunting. Gus rides past several slaughter sites where it looks like “a whole herd had been wiped out, for a road of bones stretched far across the plain.” The Native Americans aren’t in much better shape—despite their fearsome reputation, their numbers have dwindled in tandem with the buffalos’. “With those millions of animals gone,” Gus reflects, “and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed. Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants—of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters.”

This is all tragic, but it’s beautifully done.

A couple things bothered me, however. That 25th-anniversary preface contains what feel like major spoilers. They aren’t, but I’d still skip this section until you’re done with the story proper. (Unless you want to start the book as grumpy as I did.)

More significantly, while Deets shines as the only African American in the Hat Creek outfit (“He’s the best man we got,” Call says late in the drive; “Best man we’ve ever had,” Augustus agrees), the one Native American that gets extended time on the page is a vicious monster. We meet some friendlier indigenous people in passing, but I kept waiting for a real counterweight: a kind Comanche, or a decent Sioux. It never happens. (To be fair, McMurtry does have Gus take a few stabs at articulating why the Native Americans aren’t always hospitable. “We won more than our share with the natives,” he remarks near the end of the novel. They didn’t invite us here, you know. We got no call to be vengeful.” And earlier, he puzzles Call by saying, “I think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side.” I don’t think this is enough, but it’s something.)

Other than that … it’s hard to complain. Lonesome Dove doesn’t close with a climactic shootout like you might find in other westerns. But it doesn’t need to. The journey—Gus and Call’s last shot at big, unnecessary adventure—is the point.

And it’s a masterpiece.

For more reviews like this one, sign up for Nick’s monthly newsletter .

Millions of visitors. Thousands of exhibits. One fiendish killer.

Neva’s goals at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago are simple. Enjoy the spectacle—perhaps the greatest the United States has ever put on. (The world’s fair to end all world’s fairs!) Perform in the exposition’s Algerian Theatre to the best of her abilities. And don’t be found out as a witch.

Easy enough … until the morning she looks up in the Theatre and sees strangely marked insects swarming a severed hand in the rafters.

"... a wild ride sure to please lovers of supernatural historical mysteries." – Publishers Weekly

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LIFE IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY Date: September 8, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk Byline: By Larry McMurty; Larry McMurty's most recent novel is ''Lonesome Dove'' Lead: THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST By Anne Tyler . 355 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $16.95. IN Anne Tyler 's fiction, family is destiny, and (nowadays, at least) destiny clamps down on one in Baltimore. For an archeologist of amnners with Miss Tyler's skills, the city is a veritable Troy, and she has been patiently excavating since the early 1970's, when she skipped off the lawn of Southern fiction and first sank her spade in the soil which has nourished such varied talents as Poe, Mencken, Billie Holiday and John Waters, the director of the films ''Pink Flamingos'' and ''Polyester.'' It is without question some of the fustiest soil in America; in the more settled classes, social styles developed in the 19th century withstand, with sporelike tenacity, all that the present century can throw at them. Indeed, in Baltimore all classes appear to be settled, if not cemented, in grooves of neighborhood and habit so deep as to render them impervious - as a bright child puts it in ''The Accidental Tourist'' - to everything except nuclear flash. Text: From this rich dust of custom, Miss Tyler is steadily raising a body of fiction of major dimensions. One of the persistent concerns of this work is the ambiguity of family happiness and unhappiness. Since coming to Baltimore, Miss Tyler has probed this ambiguity in seven novels of increasing depth and power, working numerous changes on a consistent set of themes. In ''The Accidental Tourist'' these themes, some of which she has been sifting for more than 20 years, cohere with high definition in the muted (or, as his wife says, ''muffled'') personality of Macon Leary, a Baltimore man in his early 40's who writes travel guides for businessmen who, like himself, hate to travel. The logo on the cover of these travel guides (''The Acciental Tourist in England,'' ''The Accidental Tourist in New York,'' etc.) is a winged armchair; their assumption is that all travel is involntary, and they attempt to spare these involuntary travelers the shock of the unfamiliar, insofar as that's possible. Macon will tell you where to find Kentucky Fried Chicken in Stockholm, or whether there's a restaurant that serves Chef Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli in Rome. Macon himself is so devoted to his part of Baltimore that even the unfamiliar neighborhoods he visits affect him as negatively as foreign countries. Like most of Miss Tyler's males, Macon Leary presents a broad target to all of the women (and even a few of the men) with whom he is involved. His mother; his sister, Rose; his wife, Sarah, and, in due course, his girlfriend, Muriel Pritchett - a dog trainer of singular appearance and ability - regularly pepper him on the subject of his shortcomings, the greatest of which is a lack of passion, playfulness, spontaneity or the desire to do one single thing that they like too do. This lack is the more maddening because Macon is reasonably competent; if prompted he will do more or less anything that's required of him. What exasperates the women is the necessity for constant prompting. WHEN attacked, Macon rarely defends himself with much vigor, which only heightens the exasperation. He likes a quiet life, based on method and system. His systems are intricate routines of his own devising, aimed at reducing the likelihood that anything unfamiliar will occur. The unfamiliar is never welcome in Macon's life, and he believes that if left to himself he can block it out or at least neutralize it. Not long after we meet him, Macon is left to himself. Sarah, his wife of 20 years, leaves him. Macon and Sarah have had a tragedy: their 12-year-old son, Ethan, was murdered in a fast-food joint, his death an accidental byproduct of a holdup. Though Macon is as grieved by this loss as Sarah, he is, as she points out, ''not a comfort.'' When she remarks that since Ethan's death she sometimes wonders if there's any point to life, Macon replies, honestly but unhelpfully, that it never seemed to him there was all that much point to begin with. As if this were not enough, he can never stop himself from correcting improper word choice, even if the incorrect usage occurs in a conversation about the death of a child. These corrections are not made unkindly, but they are invariably made; one does not blame Sarah for taking off. With the ballast of his marriage removed, Macon immediately tips into serious eccentricity. His little systems multiply, and his remaining companions, a Welsh corgi named Edward and a cat named Helen, fail to adapt to them. Eventually the systems overwhelm Macon himself, causing him to break a leg. Not long after, he finds himself where almost all of Miss Tyler's characters end up sooner or later - back in the grandparental seat. There he is tended to by his sister. His brothers, Porter and Charles, both divorced, are also there, repeating, like Macon, a motion that seems all but inevitable in Anne Tyler's fiction -a return to the sibling unit. This motion, or tendency, cannot be blamed on Baltimore. In the very first chapter of Miss Tyler's first novel, ''If Morning Ever Comes'' (1964), a young man named Ben Joe Hawkes leaves Columbia University and hurries home to North Carolina mainly because he can't stand not to know what his sisters are up to. From then on, in book after book, siblings are drawn inexorably back home, as if their parents or (more often) grandparents had planted tiny magnets in them which can be activated once they have seen what the extrafmilial world is like. The lovers and mates in her books, by exerting their utmost strength, can sometimes delay these regroupings for as long as 20 years, but sooner or later a need to be with people who are really familiar - their brothers and sisters - overwhelms them. Macon's employer, a man named Julian, who manages to marry but not to hold Macon's sister, puts it succinctly once Rose has drifted back to her brothers: ''She'd worn herself a groove or something in that house of hers, and she couldn't help swerving back into it.'' Almost no one in Miss Tyler's books avoids that swerve; the best they can hope for is to make a second escape, as does the resourceful Caleb Peck in ''Searching For Caleb'' (1976). Brought back after an escape lasting 60 years, Caleb sneaks away again in his 90's. Macon, less adventurous than Celab Peck, is saved from this immolation-by-siblings through the unlikely agency of Edward, the Welsh corgi. Unnerved byy the dissolution of his own secure routine, Edward begins to crack up. He starts attacking people, including Julian and Macon's brothers too, one of whom, in a brilliant scene, Edward trees in the family pantry at the very moment that Macon is experiencing an anxiety attack in a restaurant on top of a building in New York. Re-enter Muriel Pritchett, the dog trainer Macon had met earlier when forced to work out emergency boarding arrangements for Edward. Muriel is everything the Learys are not: talkative, confrontational, an eccentric dresser, casual about word choice. She lives with her sickly child, Alexander, in a Baltimore neighborhood that is not much less foreign to Macon than, say, Quebec. Muriel is also very different from Sarah. Nonetheless, to the horror of his family, Macon moves in with Muriel. His indifference to his former life is os great that he doesn't even get upset when the pipes in his own house burst, ruining his living room. Muriel, despite her apparent unsuitability, ''could raise her chin sometimes and pierce his mind like a blade. Certain images of her at certain random, insignificant oments would flash before him: Muriel at her kitchen table, ankles twined around her chair rungs, filling out a contest form for an all-expense-paid tour of Hollywood. Muriel telling her mirror, 'I look like the wrath of God' - a kind of ritual of leavetaking. Muriel doing the dishes in her big pink rubber gloves with the crimson fingernails, raising a soapy plate and trailing it airily over to the rinse water.'' Macon, a fairly keen self-analyst, recognizes that while he does not exactly love Muriel, he ''loved the surprise of her, and also the surprise of himself when he was with her. In the foreign country that was Singleton Street he was an entirely different person.'' Surprise, however, is not quite enough; not to ne so wedded to the familiar as Macon. Sarah, the not-yet-divorced wife, though a singularly articulate critic of Learys in general and Macon in particular, finds that all her criticisms do not entirely invalidate Macon as a mate. She wants him back, Muriel wants to keep him, and a fierce tussle ensues, one in which Macon takes a largely spectatorial interest. He cannot entirely resist the suitable Sarah, nor forget the unsuitable but vivid Muriel. The final scenes of this drama take place in Paris, where the two women manage to corner him. Even as Macon is aking his decision, he is reassured by a sense that in a way it is only temporary, life being, in his scheme of things, a stage from which none of the major players ever completely disappear. ''The Accidental Tourist'' is one of Anne Tyler's best books, as good as 'Morgan's Passing,'' ''Searching for Caleb,'' ''Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.'' The various domestic worlds we enter - Macon/Sarah; Macon/ the Leary siblings; Macon/Muriel - are delineated with easy skill; now they are poignant, now funny. Miss Tyler shows, with a fine clarity, the mingling of misery and contentment int eh daily lives of her families, remind us how alike - and yet distinct - happy and unhappy families can be. Muriel Pritchett is as appealing a woman as Miss Tyler has created; and upon the quiet Macon she lavishes the kind of intelligent consideration that he only intermittently gets from his own womenfolk. TWO aspects of the novel do not entirely satisfy. One is the unaccountable neglect of Edward, the corgi, in the last third of the book. Edward is one of the more fully characterized dogs in recent literature; his breakdown is at least as interesting and if anything more delicately handled than Macon's. Yet Edward is allowed to slide out of the picture. Millions of readers who have managed to saddle themselves with neurotic quadrupeds will want to know about Edward's situation. The other questionable element is the dead son, Ethan. Despite an effort now and then to bring him into the book in a vignette or a nightmare, Ethan remains mostly a premise, and one not advanced very confidently by the author. She is brilliant at showing how the living press upon one another, but less convincing when she attempts to add the weight of the dead. The reader is invited to feel that it is this tragedy that separates Macon and Sarah. But a little more familiarity with Macon and Sarah, as well as with the marriages in Miss Tyler's other books, leaves one wondering. Macon's methodical approach to life might have driven Sarah off anyway. He would have corrected her word choice once too often, one feels. Miss Tyler is more successful at showing through textures how domestic life is sustained than she is at showing how these textures are ruptured by a death. At the level metaphor, however, whe has never been stronger. The concept of an accidental tourist captures in a phrase something she has been saying all along, if not about life, at least about men: they are frequently accidental tourists in their own lives. Macon Leary sums up a long line o fher males, Jake Simmes in ''Earthly Possessions'' is an accidental kidnapper. The lovable Morgan Gower of ''Morgan's Passing,'' an accidental obstetrician in the first scenes, is an accidental husband or lover in the rest of the book. Her men slump arond like tired tourists - friendly, likable, but not all that engaged. Their characters, like their professions, seem accidental even though they come equipped with genealogies of Balzacian thoroughness. All of them have to be propelled through life by (at the very least) a brace of sharp, purposeful women - it usually takes not only a wife and a girlfriend but an indignant mother and one or more devoted sisters to keep these sluggish fellows moving. They poke around haphazardly, ever mild and perennially puzzled, in the foreign country called Life. If they see anything worth seeing, it is usually because a determined woman on the order of Muriel Pritchett thrusts it under their noses and demands that they pay some attention. The fates of these families hinge on long struggles between semiattentive males and semiobsessed females. In her patient investigation of such struggles, Miss Tyler has produced a very satisfying body of fiction. 'Once You Arrive, It's Worse' Macon and Julian had met some dozen years ago, when Macon was still at the bottle-cap factory. He'd been casting about for other occupations at the time. He'd begun to believe he might like to work on a newspaper... He contributed a freelance article to a neighborhood weekly. His subject wasd a crafts fair over in Washington. Getting there is difficult, he wrote, because the freeway is so balnk you start feeling all lost and said. And once you've arrived, it's worse. The streets are not like ours and don't even run at right angles. He went on to evaluate some food he'd sampled at an outdoor booth, but found it contained a spice he wasn't used to, something sort of cold and yellow I would almost describe as foreign, and settled instead for a hot dog from a vendor across the street who wasn't even part of the fair. The hot dog I can recommend, he wrote, though it made me a little regretful because Sarah, my wife, uses the same kind of chili sauce and I though of home the miniute I smelted it. He also recommended the patchwork guilts, one of which had a starburst pattern like the quilt in his grandmother's room... His article was published beneath a headline reading CRAFTS FAIR DELIGHTS, INSTRUCTS. There was a subhead under that. Or, it read, I Fell So Break-Up, I want to Go Home. Until he saw the subhead, Macon hadn't realized what tone he'd given his piece. Then he felt silly. Larry McMurtry's most recent novel is ''Lonesome Dove.''

LONESOME DOVE

A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize— winning classic, Lonesome Dove , the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy , is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.

more …

• Simon & Schuster
• 9781439195260

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• About the Author

About Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove , three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

“If you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove .” — USA Today

“Everything about Lonesome Dove feels true . . . These are real people, and they are still larger than life.” — Nicholas Lemann, The New York Times Book Review

“ Lonesome Dove is Larry McMurtry’s loftiest novel." — Los Angeles Times

"A marvelous novel . . . moves with joyous energy . . . amply imagined and crisply, lovingly written. I haven’t enjoyed a book more this year . . . a joyous epic." — Newsweek

• Literature & Fiction
• Genre Fiction

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Lonesome Dove: A Novel Paperback – June 15, 2010

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• Book 1 of 4 Lonesome Dove
• Print length 864 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date June 15, 2010
• Dimensions 5.25 x 2 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 1439195269
• ISBN-13 978-1439195260
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Anniversary,Updated edition (June 15, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 864 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1439195269
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1439195260
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.65 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 2 x 8 inches
• #7 in Native American Literature (Books)
• #37 in Westerns (Books)
• #91 in Classic Literature & Fiction

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Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. His most recent novel, When the Light Goes, is available from Simon & Schuster. He lived in Archer City, Texas.

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Miniseries – Lonesome Dove

Where to watch, lonesome dove — miniseries.

Buy Lonesome Dove — Miniseries on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

Headlined by Robert Duvall's sublimely rowdy performance, Lonesome Dove brings Larry McMurtry's beloved book to resounding life in an epic treatment that broadens the possibilities of what the silver screen is capable of.

Critics Reviews

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Robert Duvall

Augustus "Gus" McCrae

Tommy Lee Jones

Woodrow F. Call

Lorena Wood

Robert Urich

Frederic Forrest

Danny Glover

Joshua Deets

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A new bio celebrates the enduring greatness of Larry McMurtry

McMurtry was too country for the city, and too city for the country, but as Tracy Daugherty shows, the ‘Lonesome Dove’ author had a reach beyond both

To be a Texas writer these last 50 years or so is to labor beneath the branches of the great Larry McMurtry oak. Even now, two years after his passing, his influence and his presence are inescapable. Practically all the older writers I know here in Austin are one or two degrees of separation from McMurtry, either a pal, one of his many female companions, a target of his barbs or just someone trying to explore a niche he left untouched, which isn’t easy, given an oeuvre that stretches from “ The Last Picture Show ” and “ Lonesome Dove ” to “ Terms of Endearment ” and the screenplay for “ Brokeback Mountain .”

The question I’ve heard lately, though, is: How good was he; I mean, really? The editor Michael Korda once termed McMurtry, only half-jokingly, “the Flaubert of the Plains.” Others invoke Tolstoy; “Lonesome Dove” has been called “America’s ‘War and Peace.’” But while he produced several classics, they represent only a small fraction of his enormous output, and the rest of it, especially in his final decades, was seldom of the same quality. A can of Dr Pepper and a Hershey bar beside his typewriter, he wrote his famous five pages every morning, and every year the books, often sequels and prequels to his greatest hits, kept coming. Much of it was dreck. “ Rhino Ranch ,” anyone?

There’s a debate here about how we judge artists, whether by the entirety of a career or its peaks. But McMurtry’s valleys are too many to overlook. In the pantheon of postwar writers, he probably doesn’t deserve a seat beside Mailer, Vidal and Capote. The Austin novelist Stephen Harrigan, one of his acolytes, suggests comparing him to Wallace Stegner, another Westerner whose prodigious writings, many thought, never got enough respect from Eastern literati. Maybe.

McMurtry’s journey from childhood on a North Texas ranch through teaching posts at Rice University, running a bookstore in Georgetown and his final years in Tucson is told capably in the Houston author Tracy Daugherty’s “ Larry McMurtry: A Life .” This is the first McMurtry biography, probably not the last, and better than most quick turnarounds. The author of biographies on the writers Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion and McMurtry’s Austin pal Billy Brammer, Daugherty has a good grasp of Texas literary history and the cooperation of those closest to his subject. If his prose is unadorned and his approach profoundly middlebrow, well, so was McMurtry’s.

McMurtry was a bit of an odd duck, and not just because, like many creative types raised in rural America, he never truly fit into any milieu: too country for the city, too city for the country. Coming of age in the 1950s, his people were hard-pressed, and hard-bitten, cattlemen and their wives, the men wistful about the cowboy’s passing, the women less so; the themes that fueled his work were those he grew up with. McMurtry was a classic small-town bookworm, a tall, gawky kid with heavy black glasses and a thick head of black hair. He did his chores, but with little brio, and was so unsuited to ranch life his parents gave him no trouble about going off to school in Houston.

I grew up in Central Texas, three hours south of McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, and I recall the moment when it hit me: Wait, I can write for a living? Daugherty does a nice job tracing McMurtry’s own realization, all but living inside Rice’s Fondren Library, poring over Dostoyevsky and Henry James and Cervantes. By the time he entered graduate school, he had completed his first two (unpublished) novels.

For a writer who invested his every fiber in the physical book — endlessly scouting and reselling them, even running bookstores for much of his life — it’s ironic that, with the notable exception of “Lonesome Dove,” McMurtry achieved far more fame from Hollywood’s versions of his stories than his own. His first novel, “ Horseman, Pass By ,” drew acclaim; one reviewer brought up Willa Cather. Although the book did not sell particularly well, once Hollywood made it into the Paul Newman vehicle “ Hud ,” McMurtry’s success was assured. The same dynamic fueled his next hit, “The Last Picture Show,” a little-noticed 1966 novel transformed into a smash 1971 movie.

Daugherty’s book is dominated by three themes: McMurtry’s writing life, his career as a bookseller and his relationships, especially those with women. The first is solid, the second a snooze and the third kind of fascinating. After the failure of a post-undergrad marriage, McMurtry amassed a large and varied group of close female friends, including the actresses Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd and the writers Maureen Orth and Beverly Lowry. Some relationships were romantic, others eased into platonic, but the long phone calls and letters he lavished on these women, Daugherty demonstrates, were the core of McMurtry’s emotional life. (His friendship with the boorish Ken Kesey gets far too much space in this book for my taste.)

Into his 40s, McMurtry concentrated on what he knew best: the tensions between Old West and new, the dying ranches, farms and small towns, what was lost as American life transitioned from rural to urban. Then, after years of demystifying the frontier, he bowed to its allure. “Lonesome Dove,” published in 1985, was a massive bestseller and a landmark television miniseries. It made him an icon — the supreme chronicler of the West, and of the dreams found and lost there.

It also, it appears, took something out of him. One senses McMurtry’s inspirations were already ebbing by 1991, when he underwent a grueling, multi-hour heart bypass surgery. Daugherty makes a compelling case that this was the turning point in his career. Afterward he suffered a crippling bout of depression, staring out windows much of each day, which is when Diana Ossana, a woman he had first spied dining at a Tucson restaurant, enters the frame.

When Ossana, until then an unknown legal writer, began co-authoring McMurtry’s novels, many in the publishing world were aghast. They debated whether she was a gold-digger or the second coming of Yoko Ono. The reality, Daugherty shows, was neither. By taking him into her home — if there was a romantic interest, it was brief — Ossana rescued McMurtry’s career and maybe his life. Once he recovered, they wrote together seamlessly. By the 2000s, spurred by Ossana, McMurtry was more active than ever, which wasn’t always a good thing. The reviews of his late books could be scathing. One prominent critic for the New York Times, Dwight Garner, said that “a lot of [McMurtry’s] stuff verges on being — how to put this? — typed rather than written.”

If the partnership of McMurtry and Ossana left a mixed legacy, Ossana deserves credit as the force behind by far the greatest triumph of McMurtry’s late career, the “Brokeback Mountain” screenplay, for which they shared an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. She also was involved in a string of McMurtry-derived television movies, not all gems. Variety dismissed one, “Comanche Moon,” as “at times cartoonishly bad.”

I suspect few Texans give a whit where McMurtry ranks as a writer, or whether his hits outnumber his misses. He’s given us so much. He cared about his reputation, but not obsessively. For years his favorite thing to wear was a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Minor Regional Novelist.” I love that. It not only speaks to his innate humility, it’s a sentiment many Texas — and mid-continent — writers can identify with. When he died, I printed up 40 of the shirts myself and gave them to writer friends around town. When I see someone wearing one now, it reminds us both of the long life, and reach, of Larry’s oak.

Bryan Burrough, editor at large at Texas Monthly, is the author or co-author of seven books, including “Barbarians at the Gate” and, most recently, “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.” He lives in Austin.

Larry McMurtry

By Tracy Daugherty

St. Martin’s Press. 560 pp. $35

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•   Authors & Illustrators
•   Larry McMurtry
•   Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove

Larry mcmurtry.

If you read only one Western novel in your life, read this one . . . no other has ever approached the accomplishment of Lonesome Dove USA Today

Moving . . . thrilling . . . perfectly realized . . . unforgettable New York Times

A triumph . . . McMurtry is superb Chicago Tribune

Flush with authenticity Wall Street Journal

More from the ' Lonesome Dove ' series

Dead Man's Walk

Comanche Moon

Streets of Laredo

Books by larry mcmurtry.

The Last Kind Words Saloon

Terms of Endearment

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

The Desert Rose

The Greatest Western Miniseries Ever Made Almost Never Happened

Lonesome Dove revitalized the Western genre and TV miniseries, but the iconic show had a long and arduous journey to the screen.

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Lonesome dove's struggle to make it to the screen, lonesome dove tv-miniseries plot and cast, lonesome dove's legacy on tv, where to watch lonesome dove.

Being met with fanfare and critical acclaim, Lonesome Dove came out when the Western genre's staying power on TV was questioned because the quality and commercial viability, in many people's eyes, were declining. The show would bring a star-studded cast and a new take on the genre, less glorified than the previous Western TV fare, cemented itself in pop culture, and inspired many to keep the dreams of portraying the Wild West alive.

However, the landmark Western miniseries struggled to make it to the screens, having been pitched more than a decade before and left to sit. We will examine the journey of Lonesome Dove , what could have been, and the legacy it has left on the TV landscape.

While Lonesome Dove would see success in 1989, the Western adventure's history can be traced back decades previously, originally conceived as a screenplay by American author Larry McMurtry. Penned in 1972 under the original title of "The Streets of Laredo," with director Peter Bogdanovich co-writing, the script was meant to be a vehicle for John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart . The reason why this did not materialize is left to speculation. With Wayne considered generally conservative and protective of American institutions, the story's portrayal of the Old West and cowboy life as gritty and unflattering may not have appealed to the actor.

45 Best Western Movies of All Time, Ranked

In the case of mourning what could have been, the prospect of Lonesome Dove coming out sandwiched between Peter Bogdanovich's well-received The Last Picture Show (also written by Larry McMurtry) and Paper Moon , with a star-studded cast led by the iconic John Wayne , feels like a missed opportunity. However, the project was kept alive with Larry McMurtry adapting the work into a novel in 1985 and winning a Pulitzer the following year. The novel would become part of a greater, successful series for McMurty, producing four books with the final release in 1997; known collectively as the Lonesome Dove series.

The novel's success led to an interest in the property once more, and, in 1989, a four-part miniseries by screenwriter Phillip Borsos and director Simon Wincer came to fruition, changing many sentiments at the time around the Western and its ability to connect with a modern audience.

Taking place in the late 1870s, Lonesome Dove follows two former Texas Rangers, Augustus "Gus" McCrae (Robert Duvall) and Woodrow F. Call (Tommy Lee Jones), who run a small livery in the town of the titular town located along the Rio Grande. When a friend of theirs returns from Montana, having accidentally killed a man, he begins to regal them with tales of the state and its ample opportunities. The two decide to follow Call's dream of starting a ranch in Montana, and they depart with several hands, including the young newlywed Lorena (Diane Lane), on their journey. However, the trek proves more perilous than either could have anticipated, and tragedy and hardship follow their quest along the west.

Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones led the cast, playing friends Gus and Call. At that juncture, actor Tommy Lee Jones was already established as an actor but was prominently known for his TV work in several made-for-TV movies and a few genre films like Eyes of Laura Mars and Black Moon Rising . Comparatively, Robert Duvall had a prominent movie career and joined the production of the box-office success of the Dennis Hopper-directed cop gang thriller Colors . The series was backed by a strong supporting cast, including Diane Lane, Anjelica Huston, and Danny Glover, who was only two years out from the massive success of Lethal Weapon .

Lonesome Dove was a massive and surprising success for CBS. When it aired in February 1989, it drew huge ratings, with over 26 million households (approx. 44 million viewers) tuning in for the premiere episode . It was also met with critical praise, heralded as one of the greatest Westerns ever made for television. The show garnered awards, getting an impressive seven Emmys, including Robert Duvall winning Best Actor in a Miniseries, and two Golden Globes. At the time, the Western genre and miniseries format were considered stagnant, leading to praise from the New York Times that Lonesome Dove had "revitalized both the miniseries and Western genres, both of which had been considered dead for several years."

The 25 Best Miniseries of the 21st Century So Far

The success of Lonesome Dove also led to follow-ups, including Return to Lonesome Dove (1993), Lonesome Dove: The Series (1994-95), and Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years (1995-96). Each subsequent attempt to reboot the series did not yield the same commercial or critical success, with the most notable tidbit coming out of the franchise after the original was that a young Reese Witherspoon played a lead role in Return to Lonesome Dove . The work of Larry McMurtry and the Lonesome Dove books would also lead to other series, including Streets of Laredo (1995), Dead Man's Walk (1996), and Comanche Moon (2008).

Still, even beyond the direct follow-ups, the impact of Lonesome Dove proved the continued viability of finding commercial success in the Western genre. It can be considered a precursor to everything from 2006's Broken Trail (also starring Robert Duvall) to the recent Emily Blunt-led The English (2022) .

Lonesome Dove

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Since Lonesome Dove helped revitalize the Western miniseries, there has been no shortage of great programs for fans to indulge in. That said, the series is still worth revisiting or checking out for the first time. Thankfully, the iconic Western is easy to find; you can stream Lonesome Dove on Peacock, Tubi, or Plex . For those wanting to check out the various spin-offs currently available, you can stream Return to Lonesome Dove on Prime, and Streets of Loredo and Dead Man's Walk on Starz. The novels in the Lonesome Dove series are still readily available in digital, physical, and audiobook formats.

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Lonesome Dove

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove , three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lived in Archer City, Texas.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June 15, 2010)
• Length: 864 pages
• ISBN13: 9781439195260

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Raves and Reviews

“If you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove .”— USA Today

“Everything about Lonesome Dove feels true . . . These are real people, and they are still larger than life.”—Nicholas Lemann, The New York Times Book Review

“ Lonesome Dove is Larry McMurtry’s loftiest novel."— Los Angeles Times

"A marvelous novel . . . moves with joyous energy . . . amply imagined and crisply, lovingly written. I haven't enjoyed a book more this year . . . a joyous epic."-- Newsweek

"The finest novel that McMurtry has yet accomplished . . . Lonesome Dove has all the action anyone could possibly imagine . . . [and] both in general and in details, the authority of exact authenticity . . . superb."-- Chicago Tribune

Awards and Honors

• Pulitzer Prize
• NAPPA Honors Award Winner

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• Book Cover Image (jpg): Lonesome Dove Trade Paperback 9781439195260

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