This piece by Ted Gioia is good, but I do need to offer a couple of corrections since writing about Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (especially) and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is my gathering ground (to use a cowboy phrase).

Concerning Blood Meridian, Ted asks, “Is Blood Meridian actually a realistic novel? Does it tell us what the Wild West really was like?” Aside from the fact that no novel can tell us what the whole of the Western experience was like for those who lived it, Blood Meridian was based on real-life events and characters as described in Samuel E. Chamberlain’s My Confess as a scalp-hunter in the 1850s. So, yes, for a certain time and place, Blood Meridian depicted the West as a “tawdry tale of sadism and evil unrestrained.”

Concerning, Lonesome Dove, Ted claims, “Larry McMurtry tried to revive the romanticism of the cowboy life.” Though Lonesome Dove, as Ted mentions, “spawned a successful TV miniseries” and revived the romantic view of the cowboy, the key word in Ted’s assertion is “tried.” In truth, Larry tried to accomplish the opposite of what Ted claims. Larry hoped Lonesome Dove would demythologize the Western by showing how brutal, cruel, and violent it actually was—or in the words of Steve McQueen’s Tom Horn, “how dirty and ragged-assed the Old West was.” But as I argue in “The Blood of Ambivalence” (attached), Larry failed in that endeavor for many of the same issues Ted raises in his piece. yallogy.com/p/the-blood…