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: #11960 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

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.

Hamlet on horseback
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry has been knocking around for more than a decade and is recognized by many as a classic of American Western literature. And no wonder. If you like a good cowboy story; if you're an aficionado of the West, in love with its history and geography; if you want your heart torn out and kicked from Texas to the Teton, then Lonesome Dove is the book you're looking for.

Augustus McRae, Woodrow Call, and Jake Spoon, three has-been Texas Rangers, hatch a half-baked scheme to abandon their dusty lives in the un-town of Lonesome Dove on the Rio Grande, and embark on a cattle drive to the upper reaches of Montana. They depart with two thousand head of re-stolen cattle along with a misbegotten crew of sometime ranch hands, lost and found Irish brothers, green local kids, a Mexican cook who can't, and the town whore Lorena -- with hair of gold even though her heart isn't.

They struggle north to untamed country none of them but Jake has ever seen -- and him a liar. They cross the Neuces, the Colorado, the Red, the Canadian, the Arkansas and up and up, fighting desperados, Comanches, sandstorms, water moccasins, bad food, bad water, bad luck and bad news. Multiple plots weave and braid and separate and double back upon you again like all the streams and rivers descending from the High Plains.

But it is into the strange landscape of the human heart which the reader has been lured. For while this story concerns a pilgrimage to Montana, it is, on another level, a journey in understanding what human life amounts to, balanced as it is between hope and hopelessness, and in the words of Gus McRae, "rich with hardship." It is McMurtry's characters, as much as the route they take, which define this journey. With all their quirkiness, these characters are mind-stickers, all. We're talking Dickens 'n dogies, here. Hamlet on horseback. From the raping, torturing Comanche renegade Blue Duck, so evil as to be devoid of humanity, to the feisty widow who has her way with the the deputy sheriff, a man who finds her "almost as scary as wild pigs", to the tragic young whore Maggie, who asks only to hear her name spoken once by the man she loves, it is a haunting group we travel with.

Snake attack on the Neuces to sneak attack on the Musselshell, Lonesome Dove ropes the reader, drags him through hell and high water, and leaves him feeling that the one certain thing is love, the existence of which is proven only by the size of the hole it blasts in the human heart.

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.