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.
McMurtry set out to bury the cowboy myth and wrote nine hundred pages that became its grandest monument; the irony annoyed him for the rest of his life. Blue Duck is pure cartoon menace, Lorena's role is to be rescued serially, and the leisurely middle could lose two hundred pages of riverside palaver without anyone noticing.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
