Home > Boone’s Lick Summary & Study Guide

Boone’s Lick (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

At a glance:

  • Author: Larry McMurtry
  • First Published: 2000
  • Type of Work: Novel
  • Time of Work: 1866
  • Setting: Missouri and the West
  • Principal Characters: Mary Margaret Cecil, Dick Cecil, Sherman “Shay” Cecil, George Tecumseh “G. T.” Cecil, Neva Cecil, Seth Cecil, Rosie McGee, Granpa Crackenthorpe, Father Emile Villegagnon, Charlie Seven Days
  • Genres: Long fiction
  • Subjects: Traveling or travelers, Nineteenth century, West, U.S., Missouri
  • Locales: Wyoming, Missouri

Boone’s Lick, the twenty-third novel by Larry McMurtry, invites comparisons with other literary pieces, including McMurtry’s classic Lonesome Dove (1985) about the adventures and dangers facing a motley assortment of characters driving cattle from Texas to Montana. In this novel, the characters are even more assorted—a grandfather bordering on the senile, a barefoot French missionary, and a Shoshone guide on a mission for Sacagawea—but the journey is the same as the travelers pick up roots and travel miles away from their point of departure. In Boone’s...

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