Lonesome Dove at 40: From Shelved Screenplay to Pulitzer Classic

Medium Boosted Essay – Literary & Cultural Retrospective
Explores how Larry McMurtry’s failed Hollywood script became a Pulitzer Prize–winning Western epic.
✅ Selected for Medium’s Boosted Distribution
✅ Read and commented on by Diana Ossana (Academy Award-winning screenwriter)

Excerpt from Piece:

In 1985, Lonesome Dove hit the shelves and promptly carved its name into the American literary psyche with a branding iron. Pulitzer Prize? Check. Critical acclaim? Loads of it. Cultural staying power? Still kicking. But before Larry McMurtry’s cowboy epic became the stuff of high school reading lists and miniseries marathons, it was just another dead Hollywood dream collecting dust.

The Origins: Streets of Laredo

In the early ’70s, Larry McMurtry was flying high off the success of The Last Picture Show and starting to get comfy in Hollywood’s orbit. The Western genre — America’s favorite myth machine — seemed like a natural next stop for a Texas-born novelist who knew the difference between real cowboys and movie cowboys. So in 1972, he joined forces with director (and frequent collaborator) Peter Bogdanovich to bang out a screenplay called Streets of Laredo. It was built from one of McMurtry’s rough story outlines, and the plan was ambitious: wrangle Hollywood legends John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda for one last great cattle-drive film. Think of it as the curtain call for the aging icons of the Old West.

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