By Archivist Susannah Broyles
Abel Fenwick, a graduate student from the University of Arkansas by way of the UK, didn’t expect to fall in love with the American West in a New Jersey hotel room. But after watching the Lonesome Dove miniseries, she was hooked and soon immersed in Larry McMurtry’s novels and the mythology of the West in film.
In June 2025, Fenwick came to The Wittliff Collections to study the original Streets of Laredo screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich. Her research explores how this early, comedic script – one so dismissive of traditional Hollywood Western tropes that John Wayne famously refused to star in it – was transformed into the tragic epic of Lonesome Dove.
The script, Fenwick discovered, is laced with humor and filled with abject failures of Southwestern masculinity. Gone are the rugged, competent heroes of traditional Westerns. In their place are men grappling with arthritis and the indignities of age. These cowboys are nearly two decades older than their book counterparts, and the “death of the West” plays out not symbolically, but physically. However, despite the differences between the characters in the screenplay and Lonesome Dove, Fenwick was able to, “see their prototypes, see the elements that later developed into the characters and story we know and love, and then figure out how they went from one to the other. From an adaptation studies standpoint, it’s fascinating.”
Fenwick is also co-organizing a symposium at Southern Methodist University this fall to mark Lonesome Dove’s 40th anniversary. The event, happening November 14-15, 2025, will explore all aspects of Lonesome Dove and Larry McMurtry’s broader legacy. The call for papers is open until August 1, and travel grants are available for graduate students and independent scholars.
Her time The Wittliff has been, “unbelievably meaningful.” As an early-career researcher, Fenwick found both scholarly inspiration and a warm welcome. “I had always hoped that opportunities like this would happen when I came across the Atlantic,” she says. “And I’m unbelievably happy this one has.”
Want to participate in the symposium? Submit your proposal by August 1, 2025. View the CFP here. (https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/29/lonesome-dove-at-40-mcmurtry-mythmaking-and-the-reimagining-of-the-american-southwest)