Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, published in 1985, is set in the late 1870s in the waning days of the Old West. Captain Woodrow F. Call and Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae are retired Texas Rangers who run the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium in the small border town of Lonesome Dove, with little to occupy them until Call decides to drive a herd of cattle north to Montana. Working with them are Joshua Deets, the outfit's tracker and scout from their Ranger days, and Pea Eye Parker, a loyal former Ranger who cannot read; the cowboys who sign on for the drive include Newt Dobbs, a seventeen-year-old whose parentage is a matter of speculation around the camp, and the men who have no intention of leaving Texas.

The novel follows the drive and everyone attached to it, including a woman the outfit rescues along the way, and it is built out of the ordinary labour of the frontier and the long distances between one place and the next rather than out of the legends that grew up around it. It was the first of McMurtry's books about these characters to be published, although it is the third in the series in the order of its events.

Lonesome Dove won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted as a television miniseries in 1989. McMurtry continued the series with the sequel Streets of Laredo (1993) and the prequels Dead Man's Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997).