Lonesome Dove
The Western that earned literary respectability and the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction along the way. McMurtry meant it as an elegy, not a celebration: the cattle drive from Texas to Montana is a long march toward death, and the friendship between Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call carries the whole weight of the vanishing frontier. He wrote it to dismantle the myth of the cowboy and accidentally built the genre's most beloved monument instead. Five hundred-some pages that almost nobody puts down once Gus starts talking.
Nothing much moves through the first hundred to two hundred pages of a nine-hundred-page book, which readers describe as “painfully slow, supposedly it picks up around page 200,” with some quitting near 120. McMurtry spells out what everyone is feeling as they feel it, so “to say this book is overwritten would be an understatement.” The Native characters are the sharpest failure, with readers saying they have “rarely read anything more stereotyped and offensive” even by 1985. Between the few real confrontations sits a great deal of trail routine. Some finish admiring the craft and report “the story never quite came together for me as a coherent whole.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
