In early January, I was driving in suburban New Jersey when I spotted a small bookstore and quickly parked the car. “What’s going on?” My wife asked.
“I want to see if they have Lonesome Dove,” I told her. “I’m dying to read it.”
My declaration took her by surprise. “That’s a western, right?”
Yes, it is, and I had never shown an interest in the western genre. I couldn’t tell her why I needed to read Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel from 1985, other than to proclaim, “It’s a modern classic!” The tiny book shop had one copy, which I snatched up and finished in two weeks. My one-sentence review: It’s among the best books I’ve ever read, and despite being 858 pages, I didn’t want it to end.
Since then, I’ve been telling everyone to read it—seriously, buy it and read it now—including a friend in public relations with whom I had a few beers recently. A week later, he texted me that Michael Williams, a writer and influencer in the golf and menswear space, was reading the book and telling his newsletter subscribers to pick it up.
“I’m telling you,” I texted back, “the book gets inside you.”
“Yeah, but it’s not a coincidence,” he said, putting on his PR hat. “Who told you to read it?”
No one, I thought. The idea to read a 40-year-old book from an author who died two years ago came to me independently. But that’s not true. After considering the question, I realized that last year a friend and former Esquire editor, who now writes for The Atlantic, posted a picture of the book on his Instagram proclaiming its greatness. I took a screenshot to remind myself to buy the book.
I asked him why he picked up the book. “Because I saw other people talking about how great it is,” he wrote back.
Have you noticed that Lonesome Dove is having a moment? The hottest book-recommendation engine, TikTok, is buzzing with people of all ages and backgrounds delivering rave reviews to their followers and encouraging them to read the book. “It seems like every guy with a BookTok or Instagram account about books has either read or is reading Lonesome Dove, and most of them are in agreement that it’s one of the best books that they’ve ever read,” Bart Schaneman, author of The Silence is the Noise, wrote in his Substack newsletter in January.
It’s not just dudes. Search “Lonesome Dove review” on either social media platform and you’ll find plenty of women singing its praises. And it’s not just book-centric accounts. Last July, a writer at the sports website The Defector (comprised of many former Deadspin staffers) recommended it. “I am telling you with as much urgency and passion as I can muster that if you have not read Lonesome Dove, now is the time to do that,” Tom Ley wrote. “It’s the best book you’ll ever read.” In February, the production company Teton Ridge said it had bought the film and TV rights to the book and its spinoffs and plans to adapt them for the screen. The Lonesome Dove renaissance is only beginning.
So, what’s going? Why is this book popular again?
McMurtry died in September 2023, the same month that a biography about the author and a big story in The New Yorker about him came out. This confluence of factors was likely the spark. The kindling is that all things western are in the Zeitgeist: the Taylor Sheridan universe (Yellowstone, 1923, Landman), the new Netflix show American Primeval, Kevin Costner’s epic Horizon: An American Saga, Pharrell’s western-wear fashion show for Louis Vuitton in January 2024.
The bigger question is why this book resonates so much that the spark became a forest fire. It might help to offer a very brief plot description: Two retired Texas Rangers in the 1870s live in a town called Lonesome Dove—a speck on the map bordering the Rio Grande—where they run The Hat Creek Cattle Company. An old friend rides into town and suggests they drive a head of cattle to Montana. They gather a crew, which includes the town’s prostitute, and off they go.
There are gunfights and stampedes weaved through a narrative about male friendships, purpose in middle age, the loss of innocence, the consequences of America’s genocide of native tribes, and the end of a world the characters had come to know. McMurtry is all about the Big Themes. Although the story revolves around cowboys, the book is an anti-Western. There’s very little romance about this time in American history. Instead, you’re confronted with the brutality of the American West.
According to The New Yorker’s story, McMurtry had a complicated relationship with the book because a television adaptation in 1989 starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones paved over many of the anti-western themes. “McMurtry began comparing his most popular book to ‘Gone with the Wind,’” The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe wrote. “He didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
I searched through the Esquire archives to see how we covered the book in the ‘80s, and my search turned up nothing substantial. That’s odd given not only its popularity but also McMurtry’s collaborator on the first pass at the story, Peter Bogdanovich; they originally conceived of it as a screenplay for the big screen. Bogdanovich directed the adaptation of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show in 1971. Before he became a legendary Hollywood director, Bogdanovich wrote for Esquire.
Larry McMurtry, the author of Lonesome Dove, in 1978.
Lonesome Dove is an undeniably entertaining and substantive book. And as The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe and others have pointed out, McMurtry was particularly adept at writing female characters. But I think Lonesome Dove’s renewal has more to do with the male characters in the book. It is mostly a story about men—with all the good, bad, and ugly elements. Sometimes they’re role models, other times they’re scoundrels, all of the time they’re real—generous, flawed, ambitious, lazy, lovestruck, horny, brave, anxious, and all other manner of emotions. At a time when we’re starving for male role models—when the men in charge of this country have distorted the idea of masculinity—readers of all genders respond to a true and honest portrayal of men, warts and all.
About halfway through the book, one of the main characters, Woodrow Call, reflects on a brief relationship he had with a prostitute named Maggie. They had a connection beyond the carnal, which Call refused to acknowledge. He abruptly cut it off and a few years later she died, having “stayed drunk most of her last year.” Maggie did, however, have a child that was almost certainly Call’s. He partly raises the boy but never officially recognizes him as his son. Call feels a deep regret over engaging in the relationship with Maggie, breaking her heart, and failing to reconcile with her. He never gets over it. The experience haunts him.
“The night he heard she was dead he left the town without a word to anyone and rode up the river alone for a week,” McMurtry writes. “He knew at once that he had forever lost the chance to right himself, that he would never again be able to feel that he was the man he had wanted to be.”
The emphasis is my own, because that line seems to capture so much of the male experience. There are moments in which we fail to act in the manner we expect of ourselves—we’re cowards when we should be brave, liars when we should be truthful, weak when we should be stalwart. Then this notion enters our heads: we will never again be the man we wanted to be. Woodrow Call never recovers from the experience and retreats into a quiet life of work, punctuated by his epic cattle drive to Montana. Other men might confront such adversity by doubling down on their manliness, seeking a hollow masculinity that offers shelter from their perceived failure. They might hide behind wealth or power, pin their problems upon a scapegoat, collapse into anger and resentment.
I’m not sure we can ever be the men we want to be. When the time comes to test our mettle, and we fail, the best possible scenario is that we recognize it, learn from the experience, and push ahead. We have to keep trying.
This story originally appeared in the weekly newsletter from Esquire Editor-in-Chief Michael Sebastian, which is available to subscribers only. Subscribe here.
