Bestselling winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Lonesome Dove is an American classic. First published in 1985, Larry McMurtry's epic novel combined flawless writing with a storyline and setting that gripped the popular imagination, and ultimately resulted in a series of four novels and an Emmy-winning television miniseries. Now, with an introduction by the author, Lonesome Dove is reprinted in an S&S Classic Edition.

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, the author of Terms of Endearment, is his long-awaited masterpiece, the major novel at last of the American West as it really was.

A love story, an adventure, an American epic, Lonesome Dove embraces all the West — legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settiers — in a novel that recreates the central American experience, the most enduring of our national myths.

Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana — and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream — the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life.

Augustus McCrae and W. F. Call are former Texas Rangers, partners and friends who have shared hardship and danger together without ever quite understanding (or wanting to understand) each other's deepest emotions. Gus is the romantic, a reluctant rancher who has a way with women and the sense to leave well enough alone. Call is a driven, demanding man, a natural authority figure with no patience for weaknesses, and not many of his own. He is obsessed with the dream of creating his own empire, and with the need to conceal a secret sorrow of his own. The two men could hardly be more different, but both are tough, redoubtable fighters who have learned to count on each other, if nothing else.

Call's dream not only drags Gus along in its wake, but draws in a vast cast of characters:

-- Lorena, the whore with the proverbial heart of gold, whom Gus (and almost everyone else) loves, and who survives one of the most terrifying experiences any woman could have...

-- Elmira, the restless, reluctant wife of a small-time Arkansas sheriff, who runs away from the security of marriage to become part of the great Western adventure...

-- Blue Duck, the sinister Indian renegade, one of the most frightening villains in American fiction, whose steely capacity for cruelty affects the lives of everyone in the book...

-- Newt, the young cowboy for whom the long and dangerous journey from Texas to Montana is in fact a search for his own identity...

-- Jake, the dashing, womanizing exRanger, a comrade-in-arms of Gus and Call, whose weakness leads him to an unexpected fate...

-- July Johnson, husband of Elmira, whose love for her draws him out of his secure life into the wilderness, and turns him into a kind of hero...

Lonesome Dove sweeps from the Rio Grande (where Gus and Call acquire the cattle for their long drive by raiding the Mexicans) to the Montana highlands (where they find themselves besieged by the last, defiant remnants of an older West).

It is an epic of love, heroism, loyalty, honor, and betrayal — faultlessly written, unfailingly dramatic. Lonesome Dove is the novel about the West that American literature — and the American reader — has long been waiting for.

USA TodayIf you only read one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove.

Now the only edition available in hardcover, this version of "Lonesome Dove"--winner of the Pulitzer Prize--marks the 15th anniversary of McMurtry's masterpiece of the American West.

Larry McMurtry was born in June 1936, in Wichita Falls, Texas, into a family of ranchers. His grandparents were pioneers, settling in Archer County when west Texas was still primarily vast, empty prairie. While his father and eight uncles were all cowboys, Mr. McMurtry as a young person had a real passion for whatever books he could get his hands on growing up in the small Texas town of Archer City. He began learning cowboying at the age of three, when he got his first horse, and didn't give it up completely until the age of twenty-three, when he left the family ranch to further his studies.

After receiving his B.A. from North Texas State College and his M.A. from Rice University, where he wrote two novels in his first year, Mr. McMurtry went to Stanford University in 1960 to do graduate work as a Stegner fellow. His first novel, Horseman Pass By, was published in 1961, and became the basis for the motion picture Hud, starring Paul Newman. The Last Picture Show was published in 1966, and shortly after became the Academy Award-winning motion picture. When Lonesome Dove was published in 1986, it received critical acclaim — hailed as the great cowboy novel and the grandest novel ever written of the American West — and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It later became a highly successful television series. Mr. McMurtry's other novels include Terms of Endearment, Anything for Billy, Texasville, and the Lonesome Dove prequel Comanche Moon and sequel Streets of Laredo. He is the author of two collections of essays, twenty-two novels, and five works of nonfiction.

Mr. McMurtry served a two-year term as president of PEN American Center in New York City. He operates antiquarian bookstores in Washington, D.C., Arizona, and Texas, and currently resides in his old hometown, Archer City, where he is actively fulfilling his boyhood dream of filling it up with books.