On TikTok, there are dozens and dozens of videos of men and women, many of them young, staring into the camera to talk earnestly about an eight-hundred-page novel that was published forty-one years ago. “I didn’t see the western phase of my life coming, but I’m glad we’re here,” one woman says. “I want to talk about Lonesome Dove. . . . ” And this is what they do. They rhapsodize over characters who “feel like they are a part of your life.” They celebrate the “absolute journey” and the “incredible” prose. “I’ve tried to find a better book than Lonesome Dove and I’ve failed miserably, many times,” a twenty-year-old British man declares.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that the novel’s author, Larry McMurtry, died more than five years ago and isn’t terribly famous. McMurtry, in his lifetime, enjoyed enviable success — Lonesome Dove sold millions of copies and won a Pulitzer Prize, his novels were adapted into popular films and television shows (including the 1989 hit Lonesome Dove miniseries) — but was overshadowed by many of his more prominent literary peers, including Philip Roth, John Updike, and Norman Mailer, even if he was commercially far more successful. Unlike with another contemporary who died not long ago, Joan Didion, there is no cult of McMurtry, no particular mystique for a man who was, in addition to his career as a novelist, a well-regarded antiquarian bookseller. Lonesome Dove, until not long ago, wasn’t even an especially remembered or revered novel of the late twentieth century — no Sophie’s Choice, no Ragtime. And unlike, say, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which is enjoying a resurgence because Zoe Kazan’s miniseries was just dropped on Netflix, the Lonesome Dove Netflix adaptation (also by Kazan) was only announced last month and has no official release date. Many of the TikTok videos precede Netflix’s announcement.

Why Lonesome Dove? Why now? And what does it mean for a publishing industry that, with few exceptions, no longer publishes novels — literary fiction, in particular — remotely like it? This is, indeed, a strange time for people who care about books. There is no shortage of reports and opinion pieces, backed up by enough data, to show that America has a literary crisis and technology is eating away at our attention spans. Books still sell — the publishing industry is much more resilient than it looks — and physical bookstores proliferate, but it’s inarguable the literary novel matters much less to mass culture than it once did. Mostly gone, too, are novels like Lonesome Dove: lengthy, blood-drenched, and male-coded. Women, as TikTok has shown, can enjoy Lonesome Dove as much as men, despite a vicious gang rape later in the novel, no doubt thanks to its sharply written female characters like Lorena Wood, Clara Allen, and Elmira Johnson.

Of late, there has been much discourse about men and publishing, men and literary fiction. Are there still male readers? Is literary fiction just for women now? Is the swaggering male novelist of yore extinct for good? If so, is this good? Thornier questions arise, too, over race and sexuality. What of the white straight man? Jacob Savage, in a controversial essay for Compact, argued that white heterosexual men had been systematically driven out of the worlds of the arts, denied the prestige that they once accrued. Regardless of whether Savage is correct, there are strong data points that show men, overall, really are reading less than women — fiction especially.

All of this hangs over the curious Lonesome Dove resurgence.

Set in the 1870s, Lonesome Dove is about two men, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, who are cattle rustlers and former Texas Rangers. Their rustling operation includes Josh Deets, an expert tracker who is black, and Pea Eye Parker. Jake Spoon, another former Texas Ranger, is on the run for accidentally killing a dentist in Arkansas; he convinces his old buddies there’s big money to be made if they can drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana. The novel itself, argues the writer Naomi Kanakia, is not like other mythic westerns, because the supposed good guys can’t really protect the people in their care, including Lorena Wood, a prostitute hoping to get to San Francisco. Many characters meet brutal and bloody ends. And the novel is a slow burn, with a couple hundred pages of comical ruminating and set building before the violence commences. Many contemporary editors would have cut it down drastically. “What’s interesting about Gus and Woodrow is they’re basically existential heroes. Their task — running this cattle drive — is absurd,” Kanakia writes. “This book is definitely not a work of realism. The main characters are certified badasses, able to kill many times their number of Indians and bandits guys. Even minor characters are often able to undertake mythic feats, like Pea Eye, who at one point walks a hundred miles, naked, to bring help to Gus.”

There are a few different ways, both sociologically and economically, to understand a novel like Lonesome Dove. Once, there were many more books like it, blends of the high literary and commercial that could be read, almost, as middlebrow — or midcult, as the famed critic Dwight Macdonald once derisively put it. Many of them were adapted into famous movies. Herman Wouk’s extremely popular, Pulitzer Prize–winning The Caine Mutiny might have fit the bill, as might the works of James Michener. “Dad” fiction, perhaps — books aimed at a certain kind of middle-class, aging male with a bit of disposable income and interest in losing himself in a novel for a few days or weeks. If novels like these are not totally extinct, they are not nearly as prevalent as they once were. Nor are popular new works that might have had a largely male audience in mind, like 2020s versions of American Psycho — a publishing sensation upon its release in 1991 — and Fight Club. Fittingly, both were adapted into now-iconic films.

If men still sit at the top of today’s publishing conglomerates, it’s college-educated women writing, editing, and agenting most of the novels of note. It’s these same women filling book clubs, going to book events, and entering master of fine arts (MFA) programs. Men are plentiful among the ranks of the most celebrated contemporary novelists, but few of them are under the age of forty. The buzzy twenty- and thirtysomething writers — from the widely known (Sally Rooney) to the more “book” famous (Emma Cline) to the beneficiaries of media hype cycles (Honor Levy) — are almost all female. Ultimately, novels exist in a marketplace, and women are simply reading more than men. They graduate college at higher rates, and it is in college where a person is usually exposed to literature at a greater and more lasting depth.

Why should a publisher take a risk on a book like Lonesome Dove when its market research tells it the audience for it might not even exist? Factor in the historical misogyny of the literary world, and a publisher can both feel virtuous and fulfill a capitalist imperative. Joyce Carol Oates once claimed on X, to great consternation, that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” It’s the sort of statement that is hard to prove — and hard to disprove. One might say, as a rejoinder, the lack of vaunted young male writers, the neo–David Foster Wallaces or even Larry McMurtrys, is evidence of a talent gap, a group not showing up like it used to. Or it could be something structural — a publishing industry, and even the broader public, losing interest in a sort of person and perspective.

A more challenging question can be asked: If more books were published by men with explicitly masculine themes, would there actually be a wider male readership? It’s the old chicken-and-egg dilemma. The audience won’t emerge because the product isn’t there, and the product isn’t there because the audience is elsewhere. Men, obviously, can read and enjoy books by women, but there is the sticky biological reality that, on balance, women will probably prefer reading women, and men may prefer reading men. Boys, especially, seem to long for male teachers and role models in the classroom. As they age, and if they want to read, they might be drawn to the fiction of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and McMurtry. They might want literature that, at the bare minimum, seems masculine.

The movement of literature back into the feminine realm has some historical precedent. In the nineteenth century, as Ronnie Grinberg details in Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, “ladies were the main audience of literature,” with Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontës, and Harriet Beecher Stowe hailed as the leading practitioners of the novel, which was a form of common entertainment. Women were, at the same time, taking over the teaching profession. Men taught at the university level, but the vast majority of working men and women did not attend college. While women would remain in the teaching profession, the novel, according to Grinberg, shed some of its feminine associations in the twentieth century. Hemingway and the Lost Generation masculinized, along with a rising urban intelligentsia, the conception of the novelist. Suddenly, writing could be synonymous with a kind of machismo. There were women, too, who came to believe this. “It is not suggested that muscles write books, but there is a certain sense in which talent and experience being equal, they may be considered a bit of an advantage,” the literary critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once said. “Of course the best literature by women is superior to most of the work done by men,” she added, yet “it is only the whimsical, cantankerous, the eccentric critic, or those who refuse the occasion for such distinctions, who would say that any literary work by a woman, marvelous as these may be, is on a level with the very greatest accomplishments of men.”

These sentiments would today rightly be considered retrograde. What Hardwick, who lived through much of the twentieth century and died in 2007, probably could not have foreseen was the decline of the male reader in the literary fiction space — and how that might impact what books end up in print. There’s evidence to suggest that the technological distractions of our age have corroded young men more than young women. Gambling and porn addictions, facilitated by smartphones, are overwhelmingly male vices. And if there’s dead time that might have been filled by a thick paperback, it now belongs to the phone, the infinite scroll. Other entertainments beckon, too: podcasts, immersive video games, and the betting sites Kalshi and Polymarket, which collectively gobble up idle hours.

If men are reading, they are probably headed to nonfiction: books about history, finance, or politics. This market, however, is shrinking. “What has happened in the last ten years is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions,” Sean deLone, an editor at Atria, wrote in a recent Substack piece. “In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books — this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published — were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.” This fiction-nonfiction inversion — the rise of one market at the probable expense of another — can likely be blamed on the collapse of male readership. “Yes, the nonfiction collapse is at its root connected to the continual, ever-devolving crisis of men. Proportionally we are gaining many more women as readers and losing our few men,” deLone argued.

It would be an exaggeration to say that there are no longer any popular literary novels by men that appeal, specifically, to male sensibilities, or even to the darker side of masculinity. Europe has stars like Michel Houellebecq and David Szalay, whose Flesh won the Booker Prize last year. Tony Tulathimutte’s 2024 short story collection, Rejection, which tackles inceldom and lurid gay male sex fantasies, won critical acclaim and sold well. There very well could be more novels like these in the near future. Publishing is a trends-based industry, and the success of Rejection, at the minimum, has probably spurred on at least a few editors at large houses to acquire similar works.

More intriguing, perhaps, will be what the publishing world makes of Lonesome Dove’s TikTok popularity. How much notice will it take? Many of the videos praising the novel are produced by women. This blood-soaked western has found a female audience. Ideally, this would motivate publishers to acquire more novels like Lonesome Dove in the future. New fiction tends to be much shorter — longer books cost more to print — and there’s a feeling among publishers that readers will shy away from thick books in this distractible age. Lonesome Dove’s online success could upend that thinking or force publishers, at least, to take more risks. A young writer, a male even, working in the vein of McMurtry needn’t see his many query emails go unreturned.

It’s not up to book publishing, of course, to fix men, but it wouldn’t hurt if more boys and young men, too screen-obsessed these days, wanted to read and then become writers. A novelist, like anyone else, can be toxic, but the acts of reading and writing are the very opposite — they are cleansing and enlightening and do wonders for the soul. Let the men, in deep contemplation, dream of rustling cattle all the way up to Montana.