Did Lonesome Dove win the Pulitzer Prize?

Yes. Larry McMurtry won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Lonesome Dove, published the previous year by Simon & Schuster. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction that year.

What order should I read the Lonesome Dove series in?

By publication order — the order McMurtry wrote them and the order most readers recommend: Lonesome Dove (1985), Streets of Laredo (1993), Dead Man's Walk (1995), and Comanche Moon (1997). The last two are prequels; reading them first spoils events in Lonesome Dove itself.

Lonesome Dove

Reader reviews of Lonesome Dove

Simon · 2026-09-26T01:46:27.000000Z

I will preface this by saying I don't think I can accurately put into words my feelings for this book or indeed do it any amount of justice in this review. Lonesome Dove came pretty much out of left field for me, considering I usually read speculative fiction and have never read a western or been particularly interested in the setting or time period. I don't know what drew me to this book but whatever happenstance made me pick it up and start reading was a blessing. More so than any other book I've read, the characters and world of Lonesome Dove are alive. McMurtry takes the time and care to let you get to know these characters so intimately -- their hopes and fears, their shortcomings, their thoughts and dreams -- to the point that I've never felt such strong emotions for or about fictional characters before. Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, anxiety and relief. They may as well all be real people. Indeed, events have such strong emotional impact because McMurtry put so much effort into crafting such vivid characters and letting you live with them and love them. It is such a beautifully written book, the dialogue is sharp and witty and often quite funny. The wild, untamed and dangerous landscapes come alive through McMurtry's prose. The twists and turns of the story are in turn hilarious, tense, tragic and never feel forced but somehow inevitable, and everything feels grounded in a gritty sense of the reality of the time and place. I just can't express how much I loved this book, it was such a wonderful albeit bittersweet surprise. It may very well have become my favourite book.

The Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel Set in the American West

Classics Historical Fiction

Pages: 960
Published: 1985
Language: English

Synopsis

Former Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call have settled into a quiet, dusty life running a livery in the border town of Lonesome Dove — until an old comrade rides in with talk of the unspoiled cattle country of Montana, and the two men decide to drive a herd two thousand miles north to build a ranch on the last of the open frontier.

What follows is an epic journey across a vast and often merciless American West, peopled with cowboys, outlaws, settlers, and the women who love and outlast them, and marked by friendship, hardship, love, and loss.

Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove is a sweeping, deeply human Western — an elegy for the vanishing frontier and one of the great American novels of the twentieth century.