Name: Lonesome Dove
ISBN: 9780671683900

About This Book

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel, follows two ageing former Texas Rangers, Augustus "Gus" McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, who run a struggling cattle and livery operation in the dusty border town of Lonesome Dove, Texas, in the late 1870s.

Their stagnant lives are upended when their old comrade Jake Spoon drifts into town, on the run after accidentally killing a man, and talks up the untouched grazing lands of Montana. Call, hungry for one last great endeavour, decides to steal a herd of cattle from across the Mexican border and drive it north to become the first cattleman in Montana. Gus, more reluctant, joins partly out of loyalty and partly in hope of reuniting with Clara Allen, the woman he loved and lost years before.

The epic drive north becomes a journey of hardship and loss. The outfit, including the young orphan Newt (whose parentage Call refuses to acknowledge), faces storms, drought, snakes, bandits, and the murderous renegade Blue Duck, who abducts Lorena Wood, the Lonesome Dove prostitute who has joined the drive out of love for Gus. Jake Spoon, meanwhile, drifts into bad company with fatal consequences.

By the time the herd reaches Montana, the cost has been immense. The novel closes on themes of unfulfilled love, the stubbornness of men who cannot say what they feel, and the fading of the frontier era itself: a melancholy elegy for the Old West rather than a celebration of it.

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Blood, Dust and the Border
Seven novels on the American West and the hard country along the Texas-Mexico border, from two of its greatest chroniclers. Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy follows young cowboys riding south into Mexico as the old range life fades, told in spare, haunting prose. Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet sweeps from the Rio Grande to Montana across cattle drives, Comanche raids, and the long friendship of two ageing Rangers. Together they trace the myth and the reality of the frontier as it slips into memory - violent, elegiac, and unforgettable.
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (Winners)
Since 1918, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has attempted something quietly audacious: naming, each year, a single work of fiction by an American author, preferably one dealing with American life. The result is less a list of perfect books than a running argument about what American fiction is for, taking in undisputed landmarks like The Grapes of Wrath, Beloved and To Kill a Mockingbird alongside forgotten winners, controversial choices and the occasional year when the board, notoriously, awarded nothing at all. Read in sequence, the winners form an accidental history of the United States itself: its wars, migrations, families and reinventions, told one novel at a time. Whether you're chasing the canon or hunting for the overlooked gems between the giants, this list is one of the great structured reading projects in American literature.

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