Lonesome Dove was published by Simon & Schuster in 1985 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. It is the book for which McMurtry will be remembered, and it is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century — though McMurtry himself maintained an ambivalent relationship with it, insisting that he had written it as an anti-Western, a demythologizing of the cowboy legend, and was dismayed when readers embraced it as the very thing he had set out to undermine.
Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow F. Call are retired Texas Rangers living in the dusty border town of Lonesome Dove, Texas. Gus is eloquent, lazy, pleasure-loving, and wise. Call is taciturn, driven, humorless, and brave to the point of pathology. Together they decide — prompted by the charismatic but unreliable Jake Spoon — to drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana, a journey of over 2,500 miles through some of the most dangerous country in North America. The drive is the novel’s spine, but the book is populated by dozens of characters whose stories interweave with the main narrative: Lorena Wood, the prostitute whom Gus loves and protects; July Johnson, an Arkansas sheriff pursuing Jake Spoon; Blue Duck, a renegade Comanche of terrifying violence; Newt, Call’s unacknowledged son; and Clara Allen, the woman Gus loved and lost decades ago.
The Drive
The cattle drive unfolds over roughly 800 pages, and McMurtry never allows the adventure to obscure the reality. The work is brutal — sixteen-hour days in the saddle, river crossings that drown men and cattle, stampedes that kill without warning. The landscape is magnificent but indifferent: sandstorms, hailstorms, drought, flood. The dangers include not only weather and terrain but also outlaws, Native Americans defending their land, and the simple, grinding attrition of fatigue, injury, and disease.
The novel’s most harrowing sequence involves Lorena’s abduction by Blue Duck, who takes her into the Llano Estacado and subjects her to days of systematic brutality. Gus’s pursuit and rescue is heroic in the conventional sense, but McMurtry complicates it: the rescue does not restore Lorena to what she was. She is damaged in ways that heroism cannot repair, and her subsequent relationship with Gus is shaped by that damage.
Death and Myth
Lonesome Dove is a novel obsessed with death. Characters die suddenly and senselessly — from snakebite, drowning, lightning, arrows, infection. Gus himself dies of gangrene after refusing to have his leg amputated, a death that is both heroic (he will not live diminished) and stupid (he dies for his vanity). Call’s response — to carry Gus’s body back to Texas, as promised, across hundreds of miles of wilderness — is the novel’s final great set piece, an act of loyalty that is simultaneously magnificent and absurd.
McMurtry’s point is that the Western myth — the noble cowboy, the righteous gunfighter, the civilizing of the wilderness — was always a story told about death. The frontier was not conquered; it was outlived. Gus and Call are the last of their kind, and the world they move through is already being fenced, farmed, and forgotten. The cattle drive to Montana is not a beginning but an ending.
The Miniseries and Sequels
The 1989 CBS miniseries, starring Robert Duvall as Gus and Tommy Lee Jones as Call, was an enormous success and cemented the novel’s place in American popular culture. Duvall’s performance is definitive — he captures Gus’s charm, wit, and underlying melancholy with such precision that it becomes impossible to read the novel without hearing his voice.
McMurtry wrote three sequels/prequels: Streets of Laredo (1993), Dead Man’s Walk (1995), and Comanche Moon (1997). None approaches the original’s power, partly because Gus — the novel’s heart — is absent from Streets of Laredo and younger and less fully realized in the prequels.
Collecting Lonesome Dove
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $1,500–$4,000
- Very good/very good: $500–$1,200
- Good/no jacket: $100–$300
- Signed: $3,000–$8,000
- Advance reading copy: $500–$1,200
The first printing is identified by the “1” on the number line. Copies with the price intact on the dust jacket flap are preferred. Signed copies are relatively uncommon — McMurtry was not a prolific signer in the 1980s.