Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13497 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-10
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 864 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780684871226
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Larry McMurtry, in books like The Last Picture Show, has depicted the modern degeneration of the myth of the American West. The subject of Lonesome Dove, cowboys herding cattle on a great trail-drive, seems like the very stuff of that cliched myth, but McMurtry bravely tackles the task of creating meaningful literature out of it. At first the novel seems the kind of anti-mythic, anti-heroic story one might expect: the main protagonists are a drunken and inarticulate pair of former Texas Rangers turned horse rustlers. Yet when the trail begins, the story picks up an energy and a drive that makes heroes of these men. Their mission may be historically insignificant, or pointless--McMurtry is smart enough to address both possibilities--but there is an undoubted valor in their lives. The result is a historically aware, intelligent, romantic novel of the mythic west that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Review
USA Today If you only read one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove. -- Review

Review
USA TodayIf you only read one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove.

Customer Reviews

One of the great American novels!
I just reread this book again and was reminded how truly wonderful it is. I originally read it years ago and if anything enjoyed it more this time. I don't read many westerns, but this is truly something more. A book all Americans should read. For a great eread set in the modern American west do try "Across the High Lonesome," a book I picked up after seeing it recommended by Mr. McMurtry.

One word: magnificent
I have never been a fan of the literary western genre and confess that I read this book solely because I watched the movie based upon this book. Incredibly, the book supercedes the movie and McMurtry's characterization of Woodrow and Gus are truly stunning. It's the characters that turn this book into a compelling classic, rarely does the reader encounter such deftly-drawn and intriguing men as McCall and McCrae. You feel as if you are in Lonesome Dove with these men, and with them every step of the way from Texas to Montana. It's a magnificent journey and McMurtry is a superlative writer.

Even if you've never read a western book in your life, this is a literary masterpiece, the Shakespeare of the range, so to speak.

Tolstoy on the Range
Stay with me here. I'm serious. I think Lonesome Dove can standcomparison to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Of course, I've only read Tolstoy in translation, so chances are I've missed alot, but there is no question that McMurtry creates something here very close to that impossible dream: The Great American Novel. I dont know that any other American writer has ever suceeded on this scale, which is why I go to Tolstoy.

McMurtry uses the Western as a starting point, but there is a little of everything here. Surely there has never been another American Western with so many varied characters, both men and and women. McMurtry juggles many different points of view, but manages to give each of his characters a unique voice. Most remarkable of all, I think, are the women in the book, who manage to escape the usual stereotypes of madonna or whore, even though many of them are, quite literally, prostitutes.

Lonesome Dove is written in a deceptively simple, unpretentious style. I've just finished reading it for the second time. Despite its length it is really a fast read, since it is one of those books that demands to be taken with you where ever you go until you are done.