Where to Start with Larry McMurtry: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Larry McMurtry — how to approach Lonesome Dove, his Pulitzer-winning masterpiece about a cattle drive, friendship, and the end of the American frontier. A complete reading guide.
Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter from Archer City, Texas, whose work returns persistently to the American West and to the gap between its mythology and its reality. Lonesome Dove (1985) was published by Simon & Schuster, won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and became both a major cultural event — a 1989 miniseries was one of the most watched television events of its decade — and the novel that definitively staked McMurtry’s claim as the preeminent literary chronicler of the American West.
Where to Start: Lonesome Dove (1985)
The essential Larry McMurtry — and the novel that defined what the Western could be as serious literature. Lonesome Dove opens in a dusty Texas border town in the late 1870s, where two retired Texas Rangers are running a livery operation called the Hat Creek Cattle Company. Woodrow Call is taciturn, driven, incapable of rest and constitutionally unable to express emotion. Augustus “Gus” McCrae is witty, philosophical, lazy when possible, and possessed of a clarity about human nature — including his own — that Call spends the entire novel resisting.
When word arrives of unclaimed grazing land in Montana, Call organises a cattle drive north — a thousand miles through unmapped frontier. The drive is his idea and his purpose; Gus goes because Call is going, and because Gus understands, even if Call doesn’t, that this is the last thing they’ll ever do that is worthy of who they used to be.
The cattle drive is McMurtry’s mechanism for following a dozen lives simultaneously. He cuts between the main drive and the stories of characters dispersed across the frontier: a woman in Nebraska who has been waiting for years for the man she loves to come back; a young deputy pursuing an outlaw through the winter north; a scout whose path crosses and recrosses the drive’s at intervals. Each of these lives is treated with the same genuine attention McMurtry gives to his central characters — the novel earns its 945 pages because no one in it exists merely to populate the story.
Gus McCrae is one of the great characters in American fiction. He is funny and clear-eyed, capable of violence and tenderness in equal measure, possessed of an irony about his own situation that never tips into cynicism. He loves Call in the way that men of his time and place could love each other — which is to say without ever finding the words for it — and his understanding of what the cattle drive is actually about (an elegy, a last gasp, a gesture toward something already gone) gives the novel its emotional foundation.
Call is the more classical figure — the driven man who cannot rest, cannot accept limits, cannot acknowledge what he has to those who matter most to him. McMurtry does not romanticise this quality. Call’s incapacity for emotional expression costs the people around him, and the novel is honest about the costs.
The landscape is as much a presence as any character. McMurtry renders the Texas plains, the Indian Territory, the Kansas grasslands, and eventually the Montana high country with documentary precision and genuine love — a love that includes full acknowledgement of the frontier’s brutality. People die in Lonesome Dove for arbitrary reasons: snakebite, accident, weather. The West of this novel does not reward the virtuous or punish the wicked with meaningful consistency. It is simply vast and indifferent, and the humans passing through it are temporary.
Reading Larry McMurtry
Begin with Lonesome Dove — it is his masterpiece and the right starting place. The companion novels (Comanche Moon, Dead Man’s Walk, Streets of Laredo) are best read after rather than before.
For the full Larry McMurtry bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Larry McMurtry author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Larry McMurtry?
Lonesome Dove (1985) is McMurtry's essential work — the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that became the definitive American Western. At 945 pages, it is an epic in the old sense: a cattle drive from Texas to Montana followed through the lives of every person it touches, anchored by two retired Texas Rangers whose decades-long friendship is the novel's emotional centre. Elegiac, funny, brutal, and fully alive on every page.
What is Lonesome Dove about?
Lonesome Dove follows former Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae as they lead a cattle drive from the dusty border town of Lonesome Dove north to Montana. The journey covers a thousand miles of frontier and a dozen intersecting lives — cowboys and women, outlaws and lawmen, settlers and Comanche. McMurtry's subject is not the adventure of the cattle drive but what it costs: the lives lost to accident and violence, the landscape's indifference to human ambition, and the ending of a world that was already passing before the drive began.
Is Lonesome Dove a genre Western or literary fiction?
Lonesome Dove uses the conventions of the Western — cattle drives, Texas Rangers, frontier violence, vast landscapes — to write a novel that belongs to the tradition of literary epic. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. McMurtry approaches the Western as a form that is inherently elegiac: the genre is always about the end of something, and Lonesome Dove makes that implicit elegance explicit. Readers who approach it expecting conventional genre Western will find something more complex and demanding.
What should I read after Lonesome Dove?
After Lonesome Dove, McMurtry wrote three companion novels — Comanche Moon, Dead Man's Walk, and Streets of Laredo — that cover the period before and after the main narrative. Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses begins the Border Trilogy and shares the landscape, the spare prose sensibility, and the elegiac relationship to the West. True Grit by Charles Portis is a shorter, darker, and funnier Western that works as a complement.
