Recommendations
Books Like Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
For readers of the great American Western epic
If you loved the vast sweep of Lonesome Dove — Gus McCrae and Captain Call's cattle drive from Texas to Montana, the full cast of the plains, the elegiac portrait of the frontier's last days — these novels share the same ambition: big landscapes, complicated characters, and the great American West treated with both love and clear eyes.
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Buy on AmazonAll the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's National Book Award-winning Border trilogy opener — John Grady Cole's Texas and Mexico are in the same landscape and tradition as Lonesome Dove, treated with more literary intensity; the most important literary companion in the American Western tradition.
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Buy on AmazonTrue Grit
by Charles Portis
Portis's great comic Western — Mattie Ross's account of hunting Tom Chaney is the compact, comic, female-voiced Western; one of the funniest and most purely American novels ever written, and the companion in the revisionist Western tradition.
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Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's masterpiece — the darkest and most important American Western novel, set in the same 1840s–1850s border world; where Lonesome Dove is an adventure with elegiac undertones, Blood Meridian is pure violence and metaphysics; the essential serious literary companion.
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Buy on AmazonButcher's Crossing
by John Williams
Williams's forgotten Western masterpiece — a Harvard student joins a buffalo hunting expedition in the 1870s; the companion in the tradition of the literary Western that demythologizes the frontier; the violence and waste are an earlier version of what Lonesome Dove is doing.
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Centennial
by James Michener
Michener's epic about the Colorado plains from prehistoric times to the 20th century — the companion in scope and ambition; where Lonesome Dove is character-driven, Centennial is encyclopedic; both share the ambition of capturing the American West in its full historical depth.
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Buy on AmazonThe Son
by Philipp Meyer
Meyer's Pulitzer Prize finalist about a Texas family across 150 years — the most important contemporary successor in the tradition of the Texas epic; Eli McCullough's Comanche captivity and the family's subsequent history are the 21st-century version of what Lonesome Dove is doing.
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Buy on AmazonDeadwood
by Pete Dexter
Dexter's National Book Award-winning novel about Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, 1876 — the companion in the tradition of the historical Western that demythologizes its famous figures; Deadwood treats its characters with the same anti-romantic realism as Lonesome Dove.
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Buy on AmazonNo Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most accessible major novel — set in 1980 Texas and Mexico, about a drug money find and the psychopath pursuing it; the companion in the tradition of the American Western that mourns the end of a certain kind of Western order; Bell is the literary companion to Call.
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