Author Guide · The American West
Books Written by
McMurtry came from three generations of Texas cattle ranchers and spent his whole career arguing that the cowboy myth was a lie people had died for. Then he wrote Lonesome Dove, meaning it as a demolition of the western, and America took it as the greatest western ever written and gave it a Pulitzer. He wore a tuxedo jacket over jeans to collect his Oscar for Brokeback Mountain and thanked the booksellers of the world, because his other life was a second-hand bookshop in Archer City, Texas, that held four hundred thousand volumes. This is everything he wrote.
By Lisanne Swart · 32 novels · The American West · Literary Fiction · Non-Fiction · Updated September 2026
McMurtry and Diana Ossana on the last western he wrote
Quick facts about Larry McMurtry
Horseman, Pass By
A Texas ranch family comes apart when the herd has to be destroyed, narrated by a seventeen-year-old grandson watching his stepuncle Hud take what he wants. Filmed as Hud in 1963 with Paul Newman.
Written at twenty-four and already doing the thing he never stopped doing: showing the ranching West as a business that eats the people in it.
Leaving Cheyenne
Three people — a rancher, a cowboy and the woman they both love — across fifty years, told in three long voices. Filmed as Lovin' Molly.
The Last Picture Show
Two boys in the dying town of Thalia, Texas, in 1951, and the closing of the only cinema. The novel that made his name, and Bogdanovich's 1971 film of it is one of the great American films.
The most exact book anyone has written about a small town running out of reasons to exist. He co-wrote the screenplay and got his first Oscar nomination for it.
Moving On
A rodeo circuit, a graduate-school marriage and a young woman drifting between them. Long, loose and the start of the Houston cycle.
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
Danny Deck publishes a first novel, drives west, and comes apart. The most autobiographical thing he wrote.
Terms of Endearment
Aurora Greenway and her daughter Emma, thirty years of a mother-daughter argument. James L. Brooks filmed it in 1983 and it won five Oscars, though McMurtry did not write the screenplay.
He is often filed as a western writer, and then there is this: a domestic comedy about two women that is funnier and crueller than the film allows.
Somebody's Darling
A woman film director in Hollywood, the men around her, and the industry that will not quite let her work.
Cadillac Jack
An antiques scout drives a pearl-coloured Cadillac around America buying and selling other people's junk. The most McMurtry-ish minor novel: a man who deals in objects and cannot keep a person.
The Desert Rose
A forty-year-old Las Vegas showgirl being replaced by her own teenage daughter. Written in three weeks as a break from Lonesome Dove, and one of his warmest books.
Lonesome Dove
Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, two retired Texas Rangers running a livery stable in a dead border town, drive a stolen herd to Montana because Call needs something to do before he dies. Eight hundred pages, and it won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
He wrote it to kill the cowboy myth and accidentally wrote its monument. It does not matter — Gus and Call are two of the best characters in American fiction, and the friendship between them is the actual subject.
Texasville
Thirty years on from The Last Picture Show, Duane Moore is oil-rich, twelve million dollars in debt, and the town is planning its centennial.
Anything for Billy
Billy the Kid as seen by a dime novelist from Philadelphia who has come west looking for material. A demolition of the outlaw legend from inside the machine that made it.
Some Can Whistle
Danny Deck, now rich from a sitcom and hiding in a Texas house, gets a phone call from the daughter he has never met.
Buffalo Girls
Calamity Jane in old age, writing letters to a daughter who may not exist, as the Wild West show turns the frontier into an act.
The Evening Star
Aurora Greenway in her seventies, still refusing to behave. The sequel to Terms of Endearment.
Streets of Laredo
Call, old and diminished, hunts a young Mexican bandit across a border country that has stopped needing him. The direct sequel, and considerably bleaker than Lonesome Dove.
The book that makes clear he meant it about the myth. Everything heroic in the first novel is stripped down here to an old man doing a job badly.
Pretty Boy Floyd
The Depression-era bank robber, written with Diana Ossana — the first of their collaborations.
Dead Man's Walk
Gus and Call as teenagers, on a catastrophic expedition into New Mexico. Chronologically the first book in the series, written a decade after the last.
Read it second or third rather than first. It is far better if you already know who these boys become.
The Late Child
Harmony from The Desert Rose travels across America after her daughter's death, with a five-year-old son and a chaotic entourage.
Comanche Moon
Gus and Call in their thirties, as Texas Rangers, and the Comanche war chiefs Buffalo Hump and Kicking Wolf. The last-written and longest of the four.
Zeke and Ned
The last Cherokee outlaws in 1890s Oklahoma, written with Ossana.
Duane's Depressed
Duane Moore, in his sixties, parks his pickup, starts walking everywhere, and begins seeing a psychiatrist. The best of the later Thalia books.
A genuinely strange and moving novel about a man who decides, without being able to explain it, that he is finished with the life he built.
Boone's Lick
A Missouri family sets out for Wyoming in 1868 to find the husband who left, narrated by a boy who sees exactly what his mother is doing.
Sin Killer
An English aristocratic family goes hunting up the Missouri River in the 1830s, comically unprepared. First of four.
The Wandering Hill
The Berrybenders continue west, and the west continues to kill them.
By Sorrow's River
Third of the Berrybender Narratives, moving toward the Rockies.
Folly and Glory
The last of the Berrybenders, ending in Texas.
Loop Group
Two women in their sixties leave Los Angeles in a camper van and drive to Texas. Light, late and largely ignored.
Telegraph Days
A young woman in a Kansas boom town narrates the gunfight her brother wins, and then the legend she sells about it.
When the Light Goes
Duane Moore returns from Egypt to Thalia at sixty-two, and to a town that has moved on without him.
Rhino Ranch
The last Duane Moore book: a billionaire establishes a black rhino sanctuary outside Thalia and Duane watches the absurdity from his porch.
The Last Kind Words Saloon
Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday drifting between Texas towns, and the gunfight at the OK Corral told in about a page. His final novel and his last word on the western.
Eighty-odd pages of myth deflation from a man who had spent fifty years on the same argument. Slight, and completely deliberate.
Non-fiction, memoir and screenplays
Alongside the novels he wrote essays, Western history and a three-volume memoir, and he wrote or co-wrote dozens of screenplays:
- Essays and history — In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968), Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood (1987), Crazy Horse: A Life (1999), Roads: Driving America's Great Highways (2000), Sacagawea's Nickname (2001), The Colonel and Little Missie (2005), Oh What a Slaughter! (2005), Custer (2012).
- Memoir — Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (1999), Paradise (2001), and the deliberate trilogy Books: A Memoir (2008), Literary Life (2009) and Hollywood (2010).
- Screenplays he wrote — The Last Picture Show (1971, with Peter Bogdanovich; Oscar-nominated), Falling from Grace (1992), Brokeback Mountain (2005, with Diana Ossana; Academy Award), Joe Bell (2020, with Ossana), plus television including Streets of Laredo, Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon.
- Adaptations he did not write — Hud (1963), Terms of Endearment (1983) and the celebrated Lonesome Dove miniseries (1989, teleplay by Bill Wittliff) were all adapted by other people.
Larry McMurtry's Writing Style: Killing the Myth He Kept Rebuilding
McMurtry's career is one long argument with the western, conducted from inside it. He grew up on a ranch in a family of cattlemen, and he thought the cowboy myth was a sentimental lie that had cost real people real lives. Almost every book is designed to take some piece of it apart: the outlaw in Anything for Billy, the Wild West show in Buffalo Girls, the gunfight in The Last Kind Words Saloon, the aging lawman in Streets of Laredo.
The problem, which he acknowledged with some irritation, is that he was too good at the thing he was demolishing. Lonesome Dove was written as an anti-western and was received as the definitive western, because the friendship between Gus and Call is so alive that readers forgave the book its bleakness. He spent the rest of his life writing sequels and prequels that made the point again, more harshly, to a readership that mostly wanted more Gus.
Technically he is a plain, fast, unshowy writer with an exceptional ear for talk. His books move because people are speaking, and the comedy sits directly beside sudden, unannounced death — a character you have followed for four hundred pages is killed in a subordinate clause. That casualness is the argument: the frontier did not do foreshadowing.
And he was equally at home in a Houston kitchen. Terms of Endearment and The Evening Star are domestic comedies about mothers and daughters, and they are as good as the westerns. The through-line is not the West at all — it is people stuck with each other, talking, in a place that is finished.
Larry McMurtry Books in Order
The Lonesome Dove books have two orders. Publication order: Lonesome Dove (1985), Streets of Laredo (1993), Dead Man's Walk (1995), Comanche Moon (1997). Story order: Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo. Start with Lonesome Dove itself — it was written first, it is the best of the four, and the prequels assume you already know these men.
The Thalia and Duane Moore books run The Last Picture Show (1966), Texasville (1987), Duane's Depressed (1999), When the Light Goes (2007) and Rhino Ranch (2009); Horseman, Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne share the same setting but not the characters. The Houston books — Moving On, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, Terms of Endearment, Somebody's Darling, Some Can Whistle, The Evening Star — are a loose cycle of overlapping characters rather than a series; Aurora Greenway links the two you want. The Berrybender Narratives are a straight four-book sequence: Sin Killer, The Wandering Hill, By Sorrow's River, Folly and Glory.
Where to start with Larry McMurtry
If you have never read him
→ Lonesome Dove. Eight hundred pages and not one of them wasted. Ignore the fact that it is a western; it is a novel about two old friends who cannot say what they mean to each other.
If eight hundred pages is too many
→ The Last Picture Show. Short, savage, and the best thing anyone has written about a small town dying.
If you want to know he is more than the West
→ Terms of Endearment. A mother and daughter, thirty years, and funnier than the film.
If you have read Lonesome Dove and want the truth behind it
→ Streets of Laredo. The same man, twenty years older, doing the same job badly. It is what he actually thought about the myth.
If the landscape is what you are after
→ My best fiction books of all time list has the other novels where place does the work of a character.
Frequently asked questions about Larry McMurtry's books
What order should I read the Lonesome Dove books in?
There are two valid orders. Publication order is Lonesome Dove (1985), Streets of Laredo (1993), Dead Man's Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997). Chronological story order is Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo. Most readers are advised to start with Lonesome Dove itself: it was written first, it is the best of the four, and the two prequels were written a decade later assuming you already know Gus and Call.
Did Larry McMurtry win a Pulitzer Prize?
Yes. He won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Lonesome Dove, published in 1985. It was his only Pulitzer. The novel sold more than four million copies and was adapted into the 1989 CBS miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, which won seven Emmy Awards — though the teleplay was written by Bill Wittliff, not by McMurtry.
Did Larry McMurtry write Brokeback Mountain?
He co-wrote the screenplay. He and his longtime writing partner Diana Ossana adapted Annie Proulx's 1997 short story and shared the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 78th Academy Awards on 5 March 2006, for the 2005 film. In his acceptance speech he thanked the booksellers of the world, reminding the audience that the film had existed as literature first.
How many books did Larry McMurtry write?
Thirty-two novels, along with essay collections, works of Western history and a three-volume memoir — Books (2008), Literary Life (2009) and Hollywood (2010). He also wrote or co-wrote dozens of screenplays and teleplays across six decades, from Horseman, Pass By in 1961 to The Last Kind Words Saloon in 2014.
Was Larry McMurtry really a bookseller?
Yes, and he took it as seriously as the writing. He co-founded the antiquarian bookshop Booked Up in Georgetown, Washington DC in the early 1970s, and in 1988 established a branch in his hometown of Archer City, Texas. At its height it filled several downtown buildings with roughly four hundred thousand volumes, turning a small North Texas town into a destination for collectors. In August 2012 he auctioned off around two thirds of the stock.
“The West is mostly a very beautiful place.”
Larry McMurtry, interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered, May 2014 — from a writer who spent fifty years refusing to romanticise it. If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
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