Who wrote the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove?

Larry McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove, which won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Published in 1985, Lonesome Dove is an epic Western set primarily in Texas and along a cattle drive to Montana. Its central figures are former Texas Rangers Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, whose contrasting personalities shape the novel’s long journey.

The Pulitzer jury honored McMurtry’s novel for its expansive storytelling and complex treatment of the American West. Although it is often grouped with traditional Westerns, the book also explores aging, friendship, violence, love, loss, and the costs of frontier mythology.

The novel was adapted into a highly successful 1989 television miniseries. That adaptation starred Robert Duvall as Gus McCrae and Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow Call. Readers sometimes confuse Lonesome Dove with McMurtry’s later novels Streets of Laredo and Dead Man’s Walk, which continue or expand its fictional world but did not win this Pulitzer.