Recommendations
Books Like Lonesome Dove
Epic Westerns and Frontier Novels Like Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is the great American Western — two aging Texas Rangers, a massive cattle drive, and a landscape that dwarfs every human ambition. These 8 novels share its sweep, its moral seriousness, and its elegy for a world passing away.
- 1Buy
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
The scalp-hunting Judge Holden and the nameless Kid riding across the blood-soaked Southwest of the 1840s — McCarthy's masterpiece shares Lonesome Dove's West but strips it of all sentiment; where McMurtry finds humor and humanity in the violence of the frontier, McCarthy finds only a nihilistic sublime; the most important American Western novel after Lonesome Dove itself, and its dark twin
- 2Buy
True Grit
by Charles Portis
Mattie Ross hiring one-eyed Marshal Rooster Cogburn to pursue her father's killer into Indian Territory — the compressed masterpiece of Western fiction that shares Lonesome Dove's perfect period voice, dark comedy, and moral seriousness; where McMurtry is panoramic and elegiac, Portis is concise and ironic; together they represent the two poles of what the great American Western can do
- 3Buy
Centennial
by James Michener
The history of a stretch of Colorado told from geological time through the present day — Michener's epic historical novel of the American West shares Lonesome Dove's multigenerational ambition and its sense that the land itself is the protagonist; where McMurtry focuses on a single cattle drive, Michener sweeps across centuries; essential reading for anyone drawn to Lonesome Dove's scope
- 4Buy
Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner
A retired historian living in his grandmother's California home researches her nineteenth-century life as a writer and artist following her engineer husband across the frontier West — Stegner's Pulitzer Prize winner shares Lonesome Dove's elegiac sense of the West as a place that shaped and destroyed the people who built it; more literary and interior than McMurtry but equally essential
- 5Buy
The Son
by Philipp Meyer
Three generations of a Texas ranching family from the Comanche captivity of the 1840s through the oil boom of the 1930s — Meyer's ambitious novel is the contemporary descendant of Lonesome Dove, sharing its Texas setting, its violence, its moral complexity about the conquest of the West, and its sense that founding a dynasty requires acts that cannot be justified; the best Western novel of recent years
- 6Buy
Butcher's Crossing
by John Williams
A young Harvard-educated idealist joins a buffalo-hunting expedition in the Colorado Rockies in the 1870s and is destroyed by it — Williams's 1960 novel is the anti-Romantic Western, sharing Lonesome Dove's unflinching look at the violence and futility of the frontier project while focusing on a single brutal season rather than an epic journey
- 7Buy
Deadwood
by Pete Dexter
Wild Bill Hickok and Charlie Utter in the Black Hills gold camp of Deadwood, 1876 — Dexter's novel shares Lonesome Dove's commitment to the unglamorous reality of frontier life, its dark comedy, and its elegiac sense that the West of legend was always a lie; the characters are real historical figures given fictional interiority in a way that McMurtry would recognize
- 8Buy
All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
John Grady Cole crossing into Mexico in 1949, the last of a breed of cowboys the modern world is erasing — McCarthy's Border Trilogy opener is the most lyrical companion to Lonesome Dove, sharing its love for the cowboy life even as it mourns the world that made it possible; where McMurtry is humorous and vast, McCarthy is spare and heartbreaking
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