Wilderness Still Lingers

Over the weekend I finally finished Larry McMurtry’s epic Pulitzer Prize-winning western novel Lonesome Dove. I have not read something this engrossing since I was a child. I audibly laughed, I sobbed, I spent hours thinking about the characters even when I wasn’t reading. There is magic that lives in this book. McMurty’s deft interweaving of characters and plot lines kept me enthralled for over 800 pages. He uses this quote from T.K. Whipple’s Study Out the Land as a concise summation of why westerns are more than just romantic legends:

“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”

Beyond my own enjoyment of the novel, I also considered Kurt Vonnegut’s eight basics of creative writing, and I find Lonesome Dove to have perfectly satisfied these conditions:

If you are looking for a fascinating read where characters become real people in your mind and adventure awaits around every bend in the trail, even if westerns are not your usual genre, I beg you to pick up Lonesome Dove. It is a magnificent journey.