Lonesome Dove was the winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and received favorable reviews. In The New York Times, Nicholas Lemann praised the novel as "thrilling and almost perfectly realized," calling it "the great cowboy novel."[7]
McMurtry himself eventually expressed dissatisfaction with the popularity of the novel, particularly after the miniseries adaptation. In the preface to the 2000 edition, he wrote: "It's hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche. I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man's Inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With The Wind of the West, a turnabout I'll be mulling over for a long, long time."[8]
Assessing the novel's cultural legacy in 2019, Nasrullah Mambrol was more sympathetic than the author's self-assessment. "What McMurtry did was to reinvent the Western novel by taking its basic elements and elevating them to the level of epic." He reached "the height of his powers" with Lonesome Dove.[9]
