The Grave's Our Destination: Death and Belonging in Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry was — is — a major figure in American letters. A prolific and popular writer, a Pulitzer and Oscar winner, that guy who loved books so much he owned one of the biggest antiquarian bookstores in the United States. He wrote daily, by all appearances up until his death at 84 in March 2021. The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and Texasville were all adapted from his bestselling books. But 1985’s Lonesome Dove stands above the others. 

Another notoriously prolific and popular writer, Stephen King, picked the novel as a favorite on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2001:

More recently, a 40th anniversary reissue with a foreword by one of the Yellowstone creators spiked a resurgence in sales. Sales had previously spiked in 1989, when a wildly successful TV adaptation of the original book premiered, and in 1993 with the sequel miniseries Return to Lonesome Dove. (Return was something of a step down. It wasn’t based on any of McMurtry’s work, and Jon Voight made a poor replacement for Tommy Lee Jones’s Cobb.)

Out of curiosity, I checked my library’s Libby app. The Green Mountain Library Consortium, which serves the whole state¹, has 40 people waiting for three available copies of Lonesome Dove, its only McMurtry e-book, at the time of writing. Lonesome Dove is hot again.

There are a lot of theories as to why. The success of Yellowstone has definitely fueled a resurgence of interest in Westerns, and Lonesome Dove is a pretty good gateway drug. It’s not as dated as Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour, but it’s still populated with cowboys, horses and local color. Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae are fascinating and flawed, engaging enough for the reader to want to follow for a thousand pages, just like every McMurtry character I’ve been fortunate enough to encounter. Lonesome Dove is the kind of book that people who think they’re too good for genre fiction allow themselves to read². It’s also the kind of book that people who love genre fiction point to as an example of how damn good genre fiction can be.

McMurtry himself had mixed feelings about the book’s legacy. When the book was reissued in 2000, he said:

I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man’s Inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness’ and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone with the Wind of the West, a turnabout I’ll be mulling over for a long, long time.

Gone with the Wind is a fawning love letter to a society that very much deserved to be shot behind the barn. But it also contains much more than the author intended. Margaret Mitchell thought wet blankets Ashley and Melanie Wilkes were the heroes of that story, but Rhett and Scarlett caught fire in the American imagination. There are no heroes in Lonesome Dove. Readers might see Gus and Call that way, but no writer will ever be able to control what readers take from a work.

The Western is often about community. In the American myth, people go west to find a new start, to escape their past, to find wealth and adventure. Lonesome Dove asks how strong those communities are, what happens when they’re tested, and how we determine who belongs. I am not sure I need to outline why this has become such a relevant issue in the second Trump administration, but I’d recommend you listen to Jamelle Bouie talk about it anyway.

Lonesome Dove talks about how we treat one another, our own family and friends and lovers. It explores when and how their lives become cheap. Who belongs to us, and what do we owe them? Call travels from Montana to Texas for the love of his friend but won’t claim his own son. Black cowboys belong but American Indians are enemies. Lonesome Dove doesn’t condone this, exactly, but there’s not a lot of interrogation, either. The author’s voice remains coolly engaging; we see these men and women as they see themselves, we see the world as they see it, and there’s no room for outsiders in this difficult, challenging place. But the isolation pays its price as well; when you divide the world up into enemies and allies, there are enemies everywhere.³

And when there are enemies everywhere, sometimes they come from within.

Early in the book, academic Roger Walton Jones⁴ quotes Deets, the African-American cowboy and tracker who has been working with Gus and Call for years: 

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Jones identifies death and its acceptance as a major theme of McMurtry’s work, and death certainly hangs over Lonesome Dove. Call’s illegitimate and unacknowledged son is an orphan. Men are murdered. Murderers are hanged. Gus chooses to die of gangrene rather than lose a second leg to infection. 

Suicide was the United States’ 10th leading cause of death in 2024 (and previous years were even higher). Males make up 50% of the population but nearly 80% of suicides; (non-Hispanic) white and American Indian/Alaska Native populations have the highest rates of suicide by ethnicity. Reading Lonesome Dove is a reminder of watching  people you love struggle and die, for reasons you may never know, or no apparent reason at all. Now, after a COVID-19 pandemic, a decades-long opioid epidemic, and semi-regular school shootings all showed staggering indifference to life, readers are trying to come to terms with death, too. Michael Sebastian at Esquire thinks the book resonates with readers looking for a new model of masculinity, and I think there’s some truth to that too, in a chicken-and-egg sort of way. But I think Sebastian’s theory glosses over some of the pain and self-sabotage that characterize the men of Lonesome Dove. McMurtry is cannier than that; his characters can be caring and kind, yes, but they’re still capable of the cruelty and callousness that modern masculinity might do well to leave behind. Gone with the Wind raises its ugly head once again.

Lonesome Dove, like so many great novels, is layered and complicated enough to hold all these interpretations. Like the country it’s set in, it carries the contradictions in ways that can be ugly and can be shatteringly beautiful. It shows us who we are, who we could be, and who we hope desperately that we’re not. At a time when our nation is facing what can only be called an existential crisis, no wonder we keep returning to it, wondering where in the imagined past we can find a hint of the future.

1. Population 648,493, though we do have a higher-than-average number of readers in some surveys. Fun fact: McMurtry’s Booked Up bookstore in Archer City, Texas, had around 400-450,000 books on hand at its height. ↩︎
2. I say this mostly with affection. ↩︎
3. No, this isn’t a “racism hurts white people too” statement; this is about barriers between people and how they isolate and damage them. The racism is connected, but it’s not the whole issue ↩︎
4. “CRITICAL READINGS: Coming to Terms with Death in the West: Anticipation of Death and the Effects of Loss in the Novels of Larry McMurtry,” in Critical Insights: Southwestern Literature, 2016 ↩︎