shut up about Lonesome Dove. shut the fuck up about Lonesome Dove

16 Oct, 2026

If you haven't read the borderline nonsensical Jacobin article on Lonesome Dove and masculine writing that was recently published you should probably read that before you continue reading this. Do not give them your email, put it into a paywall bypass or something. I have learned as I write this that Ross Barkan, the author of the article, is apparently a known plagiarist so I already feel halfway an idiot for getting baited by it but c'est la vie, we're here now.

The first thing I would like to say about Lonesome Dove is that it is an excellent book and you should read it. I have been banging this drum since 2021, when McMurtry died and I finally picked it up -- I wrote about this for Unwinnable's Exploits .¹ If you have ever worked at a bookstore what you will know about Lonesome Dove is that it is extremely, consistently popular with a certain demographic. White American men of the boomer variant can't get enough of it and it has been like that since I entered the industry. Now, in my seven years as a bookseller, had I ever seen a woman or nonwhite person buy Lonesome Dove before the last six months? Nah. There are a lot of books like this! I'd put Tom Clancy in a similar box, and maybe Patrick O'Brian.² This is just a fact of demographics, one that you automatically learn if you sell books for a living for any period of time.

Consequently, Barkan's claim that Lonesome Dove is some sort of ignored, obscure text is absurd. What I am guessing happened here is that Barkan looked at his community of (I am assuming) Jacobin-subscribed cosmopolitan hipsters, didn't catch anyone reading McMurtry, and assigned that to the rest of the world writ large. This is a classic mistake to make in the era of social media: people are constantly assuming that if something is not being talked about in their circles it is not being talked about at all. We have got to get over this. Do basic research about the topic you are getting paid to write a thinkpiece about, please. You cannot be saying a book wasn't "especially remembered or revered" when it won a Pulitzer Prize.

This points, I think, to a more general incuriosity on the part of many readers, both within and outside of Barkan's demographic. Algorithmic recommendations haven't helped this. All we do is like one thing and then get more of it. It is easy to gorge yourself on your favorite food and never have space to try something different. I can't only blame the algorithm, though. I don't think many people have much interest in leaving their comfort zone, or, at least, not in a way that doesn't immediately translate to street cred or some variant of pretentiousness/coolness. There is zero reason for your average zoomer to pick up a dad book except for simple, uninfluenced curiosity, the idea that this thing that looks like nothing might be something.³

That is, if they were even exposed to the dad book in the first place. The most expansive readers I know, the ones that are most widely fascinated by a genuinely broad variety of things, are other booksellers, and we have an extreme advantage that we are drowning in the catastrophic, algorithm-less maelstrom of choice that is being a public book buyer. A context that I have found breeds a similar reader is someone who started in libraries, home or otherwise, with little supervision. If you get hooked on Jean M. Auel as a preteen you are simply going to have a different approach to the potentials of literature than if you're confined to the designated young adult section. This is happening less and less: parents want to know what their children are reading, and older readers want to read what others are reading. FOMO is real and so is your Goodreads feed.

Anyway I am getting distracted. The point is that many readers, and I am biasing that phrase heavily towards the social media set, do not read outside of their niche. Lonesome Dove, until extremely recently, was outside of that niche. I don't think it's sudden resurgence has anything to do with Barkan's masculine absence writing theory; I think it's just one of those inexplicable flukes of digital influence, where it came up and it caught on.⁴

Now, it is weird that Lonesome Dove is a western. I will admit this. At least the resurgence of something like The Secret History can be credited to a level of inherent sexiness that aligns with what I guess is now a TikTok but I would personally refer to as a Tumblr aesthetic. I am not sure whether literary westerns are coming back (they are back in my house but I am not really a trendsetter.) They have been back in the Yellowstone set, the Taylor Sheridan contingent, but that overlaps with Lonesome Dove's original demographic... As far as I am aware, they have not been back in books.

That being said, Mark Z. Danielewski, of House of Leaves fame, just released a big ass motherfucking doorstopper western last year. Some iteration of these books are still being written and published with wide release and giving the authors enough momentum to come to St. Louis where I asked Danielewski why he chose to write a western and he referred to it as a "hard question". Did anyone read Tom's Crossing? I don't know; the whole thing is written in dialect; it's still Danielewski. But it sure was sitting face-out on those Barnes & Noble shelves!

So let's come back to Barkan's argument, about the absence of bloody macho male-targeted literature from bookstore shelves.⁵ Is this true? Mysteries and thrillers are as popular as they've always been. Horror is a booming genre, though quite a lot of it is written by marginalized people these days, so perhaps he thinks that doesn't count. What I am thinking he means is that there's now not a popular genre of writing within fiction that isn't also widely read by women. This is a point I will concede to westerns (insert patronizing internet caveat here.) That was boy territory, when it existed. It was, essentially, the male counterpart to romance (insert second patronizing internet caveat here). Genre westerns have died. It's the zombified corpse of William W. Johnstone and no one else these days.

What has happened, instead, is that the "genre" of western, as would have been labeled on a supermarket paperback stand, has been absorbed into other genres. Tom's Crossing is literary fiction, but you'll find Longmire over in crime. There's the splatter western movement in horror, and space westerns will never stop popping up as long as people keep watching Star Wars. Over time, people lost their taste for the color-by-numbers white hat vs. black hat Romance of the American West that was formulaic enough to deserve its own printing scheme. That's all it is. Extrapolating this to some sort of general absence of "masculine" literature seems like a stretch.

I am going to tie this all back to curiosity, and to curiosity beyond the algorithm. If you think there is an absence of something... if there appear to be missing nutrients in your diet... it would behoove you first to look for them. There is an extremely wide world just behind the things immediately in front of you. If you are not finding what you want in Oprah's Book Club lists, perhaps try meandering through genre. If you're still coming up empty-handed, try some books in translation. And if you are convinced that the entire catalog of contemporary writing is not giving you good enough content, make your way to the backlist. Lonesome Dove is still in print, and you could have bought a $2 mass market copy at any used bookstore in the US at any time during the past forty years.

I don't think Barkan actually cares about any of this, to be fair. I think Barkan feels vaguely threatened by the amount of women and women's interests he's exposed to on a daily basis and has decided to make this persecution complex everybody else's problem. I think this was a first draft thinkpiece idea that could have stayed in the groupchat where there were people to tell him no. I think I'm giving it more respect than it's due by writing this much about it.

But I really think everyone should read Lonesome Dove!!!!!