Lonesome Dove

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER LARRY MCMURTRY’S VISIONARY NOVEL WAS PUBLISHED, IT STILL INSPIRES OUR LOVE OF OLD WEST HISTORY.

- LARRY MCMURTRY

The Dallas Times Herald newsroom was abuzz that summer of 1985. Practically everyone had a copy of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.

We knew or at least knew of McMurtry, the Archer City native often seen wearing his “Minor Regional Novelist” sweatshirt. Those of us longing for a career in fiction could only dream of being that kind of minor regional novelist. McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By (1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), The Last Picture Show (1966) and Terms of Endearment (1975) had been adapted as movies, winning 10 Academy Awards with 16 other nominations. But in Lonesome Dove, McMurtry left behind his 20th-century West for an epic, 843-page cattle drive from South Texas to Montana.

Long novels of the West were not unheard of in the mid-1980s—such as James Michener’s Centennial (1974) and Lucia St. Clair Robson’s Ride the Wind (1982)—but the critical and commercial reaction to Lonesome Dove boggled the mind. Holding its own against Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, John Irving’s The Cider House Rules and Louis L’Amour’s Jubal Sackett, Lonesome Dove sold almost 300,000 copies in hardcover and more than a million when it was released in paperback. In 1986, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize.