Lonesome Dove Study Guide

Larry McMurtry was born and spent most of his life in Archer City, Texas, where his parents had a ranch. Ranching was in McMurtry’s blood; his ancestors had come to Texas from Missouri in the early 19th century, and some of his uncles had participated in the country’s last cattle drives in the 1880-90s. McMurtry pursued a different path, leaving home to pursue his college education at the University of North Texas. Subsequently, he earned a master’s degree from Rice University and spent a year as a fellow at the prestigious Standford University Writing Center in California. He published his first book, Horsemen Pass By, in 1961, just after finishing that fellowship. It went on to be turned into a film, just like six more of McMurtry’s 33 other works of fiction. In addition, he published multiple collections of essays and the scripts for several TV series and films. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for Lonesome Dove, an Oscar for the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain, and a National Humanities Medal in 2014 for his life’s work. In addition to his writing, McMurtry served for a time as the president of the PEN American Center, and he founded and ran an antiquarian bookstore in Archer City named “Booked Up.” McMurtry was married twice and had one child, a son, with his first wife. He died of heart failure in 2021 at the age of 84.

Some of the events and characters in Lonesome Dove were based on the famed third cattle drive of cowboys Charles Goodnight (who has a cameo in the novel) and Oliver Loving. Goodnight was a former Texas Ranger and Confederate soldier who became a wealthy cattle rancher later in his life; Oliver Loving was a Kentucky-born Texas cattleman who became close friends with Goodnight. Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae are modeled at least in part on Goodnight and Loving, respectively. During their third and final drive, Comanche warriors fatally wounded Loving in a surprise attack. Although he made it to a U.S. Army fort in New Mexico, he succumbed to his injuries two weeks later, with Goodnight by his side. After completing the drive, Goodnight exhumed Loving’s body and brought it back to Texas for burial. These men—and the characters in Lonesome Dove—were among those Americans involved in the expansion of the country, a process begun in the 17th century and completed in the early 20th century with the statehoods of New Mexico and Arizona. As settlers pushed westward, they displaced and killed the Indigenous inhabitants of the land, carrying out massive oppression that led to an era of war between the United States and the continent’s original inhabitants. The late 19th century saw some of the bloodiest conflicts of the American Indian (or Frontier) Wars, including Red Cloud’s War—fought from 1866–1868 between the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapahoe nations and the US government over control of territory that became the state of Wyoming—and the Great Sioux War, which happened in 1876–1877. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills—sacred to the Cheyenne and Sioux nations—instigated this war, during which the famed General George Armstrong Custer and famous Oglala leader Crazy Horse both died.

Larry McMurtry described Lonesome Dove as an heir to Miguel de Cervantes’s epic novel Don Quixote, which was written early in the 17th century. Cervantes’s novel follows the adventures of a small-time nobleman named Don Quixote who, having read too many tales of knights in shining armor, decides to live his life according to medieval chivalric codes. Both books feature a pair of central characters meant as foils to each other, one with a grand and romantic vision (Don Quixote and Woodrow Call), the other with a much more practical sensibility (Sancho Panza and Augustus McCrae). Both critique and attempt to deromanticize ideological systems—medieval chivalric codes in the case of Don Quixote, and the mythos of the American cowboy and lawman in Lonesome Dove. However, both novels themselves nevertheless contribute to the very traditions they seek to comment on. As a western, Lonesome Dove is also a descendant of works like Zane Grey’s 1912 Riders of the Purple Sage, a book widely credited as a founding example of the genre. Furthermore, Riders and Lonesome Dove share an artistic vision that moves the western beyond pulpy entertainment novels and toward a deeper dive into the human psyche. Following Lonesome Dove’s critical and popular success, McMurtry featured its protagonists in three more books. Prequels Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997) tell the story of Call’s and McCrae’s early and middle careers, respectively, while Streets of Laredo (1993) sees a post-cattle-drive Call being hired to pursue and bring to justice a terrorist charged with attacking a railroad company’s employees. Finally, Lonesome Dove is frequently compared to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. Both books came out in 1985, both are epic in scope and scale, and both seek to demythologize the romantic view of westward expansion by focusing on the violence and hardships of the period.