Lonesome Dove at 40: McMurtry, Mythmaking, and the Reimagining of the American Southwest

A Larry McMurtry Symposium

November 14–15, 2025 Southern Methodist University | Dallas, Texas Co-Sponsored by SMU English’s Narrative Now Initative and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Organizers:

Dr. Christopher González
English, SMU
[ctgonzalez@smu.edu]

Dr. Ariel Ron
History, SMU
[aron@mail.smu.edu]

Abel Fenwick
English, U of Arkansas
[fenwick@uark.edu]

Forty years after its publication, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove continues to cast a long shadow across American literature, screen culture, and the cultural memory of the Southwest. A critical and commercial triumph, the novel earned McMurtry the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a massively successful 1989 television adaptation. And yet McMurtry, always a skeptic of romanticized frontier mythology, expressed ambivalence about the reception of Lonesome Dove, calling it “the Gone with the Wind of the West”—a work he feared had reinforced rather than dismantled myths of Western heroism, racial innocence, and masculine stoicism.

This inaugural Larry McMurtry Symposium invites scholars, critics, writers, archivists, and cultural historians to reflect on the literary and cultural afterlives of Lonesome Dove, as well as the wider legacy of Larry McMurtry as novelist, screenwriter, bibliophile, critic, and public intellectual. Hosted at Southern Methodist University in Dallas—just two hours from McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City—this event marks the beginning of a biennial tradition honoring major contributions to Southwestern letters and American narrative culture.

We welcome a wide array of approaches, including literary criticism, film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, archival studies, critical race theory, environmental humanities, and book history. Scholars working in regional history, borderlands studies, and the historiography of the American West are especially encouraged to apply. Papers from this conference will be considered for inclusion in a planned edited volume.

We invite proposals for individual papers (20 minutes), pre-formed panels (3 participants), or roundtables. We especially encourage submissions from graduate students, early-career researchers, and scholars working in interdisciplinary or creative-critical modes. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

The Lonesome Dove Saga

· Critical interpretations of the Lonesome Dove tetralogy

· Narrative structure, myth, and the limits of the epic form

· Gender, race, and regional identity in the novels

· Stoicism, aging, and the masculine frontier

· Misreadings and cultural (mis)appropriations of McMurtry’s critique

The Historical and Archival McMurtry

· McMurtry’s work as historical fiction: reimagining 19th-century Texas and the postbellum West

· The history behind the fiction: cattle drives, settler expansion, and economic change

· McMurtry as chronicler and critic of Texas mythologies

· Archives, correspondence, and unpublished materials: research opportunities

· Material culture, rare books, and the history of the book trade in the American Southwest

McMurtry and the Screen Trade

· Adaptation theory and McMurtry’s role in film/television

· Lonesome Dove (1989) and its sequels: narrative compression, gender, violence

· From The Last Picture Show to Brokeback Mountain: collaboration and authorship

· Hollywood, celebrity, and the commodification of literary Westerns

The Cultural Legacy of Lonesome Dove

· Frontier nostalgia and the politics of reception

· Lonesome Dove in Texas: place-making and cultural tourism

· Fan cultures, reader reception, and the endurance of the saga in popular memory

· Teaching Lonesome Dove and McMurtry in the classroom

The Literary and Archival McMurtry

· McMurtry as critic, collector, and historian of the book

· Booked Up and the economies of rare book culture

· Archives, correspondence, and unpublished materials

· Intersections with the Texas literary renaissance

Revisiting the Western through McMurtry

· Queer readings and gender nonconformity in the McMurtry canon

· Settler colonialism, Indigenous erasure, and the genre’s contradictions

· Comparative studies: McMurtry alongside Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy, Anzaldúa, Silko, Anaya

· The American West as transnational or global imaginary

Other areas of interest include:

· Ecological imaginaries and environmental storytelling

· McMurtry’s style: humor, irony, sentimentality, and restraint

· Memory, aging, and time in McMurtry’s fiction

· McMurtry and the shifting landscape of literary prestige

To submit:

Please send a 300-word abstract and 100-word bio by August 1, 2025 to lonesomedoveconference@gmail.com. Include your name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), paper title, and contact information. Notifications will be sent by September 5, 2025. A limited number of travel grants may be available for graduate students, contingent faculty, and early-career scholars. If you wish to be considered for one of the travel grants, please indicate it in your submission. Also, notify us of any A/V requirements for your paper, should you be selected.

The symposium will feature a public keynote, opportunities for networking, and access to rare materials related to McMurtry’s legacy.

We look forward to gathering in Dallas to honor a towering figure of American letters—and to reexamine, with fresh eyes, the stories he told and the myths he challenged.