Bestselling winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Lonesome
Dove is an American classic. First published in 1985, Larry
McMurtry's epic novel combined flawless writing with a
storyline and setting that gripped the popular imagination,
and ultimately resulted in a series of four novels and an
Emmy-winning television miniseries. Now, with an
introduction by the author, Lonesome Dove is reprinted in
an S&S Classic Edition.
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, the author of Terms of
Endearment, is his long-awaited masterpiece, the major
novel at last of the American West as it really was.
A love story, an adventure, an American epic, Lonesome Dove
embraces all the West -- legend and fact, heroes and
outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settiers -- in a
novel that recreates the central American experience, the
most enduring of our national myths.
Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the
story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana -- and much
more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved
not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part
of the American Dream -- the attempt to carve out of the
last remaining wilderness a new life.
Augustus McCrae and W. F. Call are former Texas Rangers,
partners and friends who have shared hardship and danger
together without ever quite understanding (or wanting to
understand) each other's deepest emotions. Gus is the
romantic, a reluctant rancher who has a way with women and
the sense to leave well enough alone. Call is a driven,
demanding man, a natural authority figure with no patience
for weaknesses, and not many of his own. He is obsessed
with the dream of creating his own empire, and with the
need to conceal a secret sorrow of his own. The two men
could hardly be more different, but both are tough,
redoubtable fighters who have learned to count on each
other, if nothing else.
Call's dream not only drags Gus along in its wake, but
draws in a vast cast of characters:
-- Lorena, the whore with the proverbial heart of gold,
whom Gus (and almost everyone else) loves, and who survives
one of the most terrifying experiences any woman could
have...
-- Elmira, the restless, reluctant wife of a small-time
Arkansas sheriff, who runs away from the security of
marriage to become part of the great Western adventure...
-- Blue Duck, the sinister Indian renegade, one of the most
frightening villains in American fiction, whose steely
capacity for cruelty affects the lives of everyone in the
book...
-- Newt, the young cowboy for whom the long and dangerous
journey from Texas to Montana is in fact a search for his
own identity...
-- Jake, the dashing, womanizing exRanger, a comrade-in-
arms of Gus and Call, whose weakness leads him to an
unexpected fate...
-- July Johnson, husband of Elmira, whose love for her
draws him out of his secure life into the wilderness, and
turns him into a kind of hero...
Lonesome Dove sweeps from the Rio Grande (where Gus and
Call acquire the cattle for their long drive by raiding the
Mexicans) to the Montana highlands (where they find
themselves besieged by the last, defiant remnants of an
older West).
It is an epic of love, heroism, loyalty, honor, and
betrayal -- faultlessly written, unfailingly dramatic.
Lonesome Dove is the novel about the West that American
literature -- and the American reader -- has long been
waiting for.
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