Recommendations
Books Like Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry
For readers of the elegiac Western sequel
If you loved Streets of Laredo — Captain Call in old age, pursuing Joey Garza through the brutal Rio Grande country, the sense of a world ending as the West closes — these novels share the same elegiac register: aging heroes whose world has moved past them, the frontier's passing, and the American West in its last days.
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Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning original — the essential predecessor; Streets of Laredo's entire emotional weight depends on having experienced Lonesome Dove; Gus McCrae and Call's cattle drive, Gus's death, and the world that Streets of Laredo is mourning the loss of.
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Buy on AmazonNo Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most accessible major novel — the companion in American fiction about an aging lawman whose world has moved past what his moral framework can accommodate; Bell and Call are parallel figures, both old men confronting a violence they cannot understand or stop.
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Buy on AmazonTrue Grit
by Charles Portis
Portis's great comic Western — the companion in the revisionist Western tradition; Rooster Cogburn's old age and physical decline (seen through Mattie's adult perspective) is the comic version of what Call's decline represents in Streets of Laredo; the humor that Streets of Laredo lacks.
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Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's masterpiece — the essential companion in the Western tradition; the border violence of Blood Meridian (set in the 1840s–1850s) is the historical truth that Streets of Laredo's elegiac Western is mourning the passing of; the most important serious literary companion.
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Buy on AmazonAll the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's National Book Award-winning Western — the same Texas/Mexico border world treated with McCarthy's more literary technique; John Grady Cole's crossing into Mexico is in the same landscape as Call's pursuit of Joey Garza, and the two novels together define the serious American Western tradition.
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Buy on AmazonButcher's Crossing
by John Williams
Williams's literary Western — the companion in the tradition of the Western that demythologizes the frontier; the buffalo hunting expedition's failure and waste are an earlier literary version of what Streets of Laredo is doing with Call's failed pursuit.
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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 capture by Comanches and the family's subsequent history are the 21st-century version of the same Texas frontier world.
- 8Buy on Amazon
Centennial
by James Michener
Michener's epic about the Colorado plains — the companion in scope and historical depth; where Streets of Laredo is character-driven and elegiac, Centennial is encyclopedic; both share the ambition of capturing the American West in its full historical complexity.
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