Horseman, Pass By was published by Harper & Brothers in 1961 when Larry McMurtry was twenty-five years old. The title comes from Yeats’s epitaph — “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” — and it sets the novel’s tone precisely. Lonnie Bannon, seventeen, lives on his grandfather Homer’s cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle in the early 1950s. Homer is old, principled, and rooted in a code of conduct shaped by decades of ranching. His stepson Hud — Homer’s second wife’s son from a previous marriage — is everything Homer is not: amoral, charismatic, sexually predatory, and utterly contemptuous of the values that Homer represents.
The crisis arrives when Homer’s cattle are diagnosed with hoof-and-mouth disease. The government orders the entire herd destroyed. Homer, who built his life around those cattle, is devastated — not merely financially but existentially. The herd is driven into trenches and shot, and with them goes everything Homer has lived for. Hud sees the destruction as an opportunity: the insurance money can fund oil drilling. The conflict between Homer’s ethic of stewardship and Hud’s ethic of exploitation is the novel’s central tension, and McMurtry refuses to sentimentalize either position. Homer’s world is dying not because it was defeated but because the economic and cultural conditions that sustained it no longer exist.
The Film Adaptation
Martin Ritt’s 1963 film Hud, starring Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, and Melvyn Douglas, made McMurtry famous but also distorted his novel. Newman’s Hud was so charismatic — cool, handsome, rebellious — that audiences rooted for him, which was precisely the opposite of McMurtry’s intention. The novel’s Hud is genuinely repellent: he assaults Halmea, the Black housekeeper, and his charm is the charm of a predator. McMurtry later remarked that Hollywood had “taken a villain and made him a hero,” and the experience colored his relationship with film adaptation for decades.
Patricia Neal won an Academy Award for her performance as Halmea (renamed Alma in the film), and Melvyn Douglas won Best Supporting Actor as Homer. The film’s black-and-white cinematography by James Wong Howe perfectly captures the flat, harsh Texas landscape.
McMurtry’s Debut in Context
The novel established McMurtry’s lifelong subject: the collision between the mythic West and the modern West, between the cowboy ideal and the oil-and-highway reality. It also established his characteristic method — plain, precise prose that lets landscape and gesture carry emotional weight without authorial commentary. The voice owes something to Hemingway but is warmer, more attuned to the rhythms of Texas speech.
The title’s command to “pass by” is an instruction to the reader as much as to the horseman: look at this world clearly, acknowledge its beauty and its brutality, and do not flinch.
Collecting Horseman, Pass By
First edition (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1961): Cloth binding in rust/brown. Dust jacket designed with Western imagery.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $2,000–$5,000
- Very good/very good: $800–$1,500
- Good/no jacket: $100–$300
- Signed copies: $3,000–$7,000
McMurtry’s debut is his most valuable book in first edition. The print run was small (McMurtry was unknown), and copies in fine condition with intact dust jackets are genuinely scarce.