Delivered at Lonesome Dove at 40: McMurtry, Mythmaking, and the Reimagining of the American Southwest, 14th and 15th November 2025, Southern Methodist University.

Although almost every aspect of Lonesome Dove has been extensively documented in the years since its release, the exact content John Wayne took offence to within the original screenplay Streets of Laredo (McMurtry & Bogdonavich 1972) remains a mystery. Given Larry McMurtry’s often voiced concerns that he had produced “the Gone with the Wind of the West” (2014) in response to widespread misunderstanding of its subversive themes, the fact that the novel emerged from a screenplay so overt in its criticism of Western myths that the genre’s most famous stars refused to appear in it raises questions as to the nature of the content which inspired their ire – questions never elaborated upon by the scholars who refer to this snub.

The most comprehensive reference to the original screenplay is found in A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove (2012), which presents the original as a “total critique” of the Western genre. As well as discussions of the time it takes to urinate as an older man undermining masculinity more generally, specific details – the most notable being Augustus McCrae dying in the process of trying to tame a horse in the original, rather than fighting Native Americans – represents an abject failure of the specific brand of Southwestern masculinity propagated on the silver screen by Hollywood throughout the 1950s. In the novel, conversely, by emphasising Woodrow Call’s stoic nature and Gus McCrae’s age-defying sexual appetite, Larry McMurty perpetuated the very ideals of Southwestern masculinity his initial screenplay critiqued.

My paper will examine the metamorphosis of masculinities between the original Streets of Laredo (1972) screenplay and the publication of Lonesome Dove (1985), using a historicist lens to examine how the social climate of the United States at the time each was produced may have influenced both the presentation and their reception.