Lonesome Dove

The Drive

Captain Woodrow Call and Augustus ‘Gus’ McCrae are retired Texas Rangers running a livery operation in the dusty town of Lonesome Dove. When word comes of good grazing land in Montana — untouched, unclaimed — Call decides to drive cattle north. The decision launches a thousand-page journey and, for most of the people who join the drive, a journey toward death.

McMurtry’s great subject is endings. The cattle drive is itself a form of elegy — the frontier is closing, the Indian Wars are ending, the Texas Ranger era is over. The drive is an attempt to reach something that may not still exist. Gus understands this and accepts it; Call cannot accept what he understands.

Gus McCrae

Augustus McCrae is one of the great characters in American fiction — funny, clear-eyed, capable of violence and tenderness in equal measure, fully aware of the irony of his own position. His friendship with Call is the emotional engine of the novel. They have been together for decades without ever fully understanding each other, and McMurtry makes that incomprehension feel like love.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Lonesome Dove apart: The characters — particularly Gus McCrae — are among the most fully realised in American fiction; The landscape is rendered with documentary precision and emotional weight; and The novel earns its length — every life in it is given genuine attention. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Lonesome Dove give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The Western as a form is essentially elegiac — it is always already about the end of something. The friendship between Call and Gus is the novel’s emotional centre — two men who are everything to each other and cannot say so. McMurtry demythologises the frontier while loving it — the West of Lonesome Dove is harsh, arbitrary, and beautiful. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Larry McMurtry’s prose in Lonesome Dove is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

945 pages requires commitment — this is not a novel to rush. The violence is frontier-era and can be brutal. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of American literature and anyone willing to commit to a long, rewarding novel about friendship, landscape, and endings.

Gus and Call: One of Fiction’s Great Friendships

At the heart of Lonesome Dove are Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, two former Texas Rangers running a small livery outfit on the Mexican border who decide, late in life, to drive a herd of cattle north to the unspoiled grasslands of Montana. Gus — talkative, philosophical, romantic, idle, and wise — and Call — silent, driven, dutiful, and emotionally walled-off — form one of the most fully realized friendships in American fiction, and Larry McMurtry uses their contrasting temperaments to explore everything the novel cares about: love, work, courage, regret, and the price of the lives men choose. The cattle drive itself becomes an epic canvas across which McMurtry assembles an enormous cast — the prostitute Lorena, the young Newt, the tracker Deets, the renegade Blue Duck — and stages a story that is by turns funny, romantic, brutally violent, and unbearably sad.

What lifts the novel above genre is its elegiac awareness that it is chronicling the end of something. The open frontier that Gus and Call helped tame is already vanishing, and the drive to Montana is, in part, an old man’s attempt to outrun his own obsolescence. McMurtry, who set out partly to puncture the romantic mythology of the West, ended up writing the most beloved Western ever published — precisely because he saw the myth clearly enough to mourn it. The 1985 Pulitzer Prize and the iconic television adaptation only confirmed what readers already knew: that this is one of the great American novels of friendship, landscape, and endings, fully worth the commitment its 900-plus pages require.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — The definitive American Western — epic, elegiac, and fully alive on every page.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Larry Mcmurtry
• All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy — Full Review
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy — Full Review

The Pulitzer and the Television Adaptation

Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. The CBS miniseries adaptation aired in February 1989, running for eight hours over four nights, with Robert Duvall as Augustus McCrae and Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow F. Call. The miniseries was one of the most-watched television events of the year and is considered by many television historians one of the greatest American television productions of the 1980s. Duvall received an Emmy nomination; both he and Jones were widely praised for performances that had already been planned as a joint project before the novel was even finished — they had discussed playing the characters for years.

McMurtry’s Revisionism

McMurtry had built his literary reputation on novels that demythologised the American West — Horseman, Pass By (1961), The Last Picture Show (1966) — and described Lonesome Dove as an attempt to portray the cattle drives of the 1870s with documentary accuracy rather than romantic elevation. He has said that the novel took on emotional weight he had not planned, and that Gus McCrae in particular became more fully realized than any character he had previously created. The paradox — that a revisionist intent produced the most beloved traditional Western novel in decades — reflects the particular quality of McMurtry’s affection for the material he was interrogating.