NEW YORK -- The prestigious 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction Thursday was awarded to 'Lonesome Dove' a sprawling saga by Larry McMurtry about the old West, with a cast of characters driving cattle from a dusty Texas border town to the mountains of Montana.
McMurtry, 49, of Washington, D.C., is a master of characterization. Several of his 12 books have been turned into award-winning movies - including 'Hud,' 'The Last Picture Show' and 'Terms of Endearment.'
The heroes of 'Lonesome Dove,' which is 843 pages long, are two former Texas rangers who retired after taming the Indians. The crusty pair drive a herd to Montana, where the frontier remains to be conquered.
There are six Pulitzers for arts and letters and one music award, all of which are worth $1,000 each. The awards were announced by Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
For the 12th time in its 70-year history, there was no award given for drama.
The Pulitzer Prize Board rejected a unanimous recommendation from its drama jury, which had picked Robert Wilson's 'The Civil Wars,' said Mel Gussow, New York Times drama critic and a member of the panel.
'I'm very disappointed,' said Gussow. 'I can only surmise that the board thought it didn't qualify because it isn't a scripted stage play in the traditional sense.'
'It is an amalgam of music, drama, dance -- a spectacular. It can't be read. It has to be seen,' he said.
The 18-member Pulitzer Board, consisting of prominent journalists, editors, publishers, university presidents and the dean of Columbias' Journalism School, can accept or reject the nomination of each jury.
No statement was issued by the board to explain its decision. The last time the drama award was withheld was in 1974.
Also garnering arts and letters award was, '... the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age' by Walter McDougall, 39, an associate professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, for history.
The book is an account of Sputnik I and its affects on domestic and international policies.
'I am pleased beyond description, but I guess I'm just the worrying sort,' said McDougall. 'What do you do for an encore? How do you handle the publicity? And I guess the biggest problem is retaining one's humility.'
McDougall is currently on leave and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
The biography prize went to 'Louise Bogan: A Portrait' by Elizabeth Frank, of New York, who teaches at Bard College.
'The Flying Change' by Henry Taylor, 44, a literature professor at American University, won for poetry.
'He is a man of the earth,' said Beverly Jarrett, executive editor of LSU Press, who published Taylor's work. 'The poems speak to and of the land in ways a lot of contemporary verse does not.
'His style is formal and traditional but not limited to one metric pattern. His poems are longer than a few stanzas, some 2-3 pages, but he's not an epic poet.'
The general non-fiction prize was shared between 'Move Your Shadow' by Joseph Lelyveld, 49, a New York Times correspondent in South Africa, and 'Common Ground' by J. Anthony Lukas, 42, also a journalist.
It was the Harvard graduate's second Pulitzer.
'Commond Ground' looked at desegregation and its effects on three families in Boston from 1968 to 1978. The book has won this year's National Book Critics Circle award for non-fiction and the National Book Award.
Lukas worked on 'Common Ground' for seven years and in it, relates how the issues of race and class affected the people, beginning after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Lukas, who worked at the Baltimore Sun and The New York Times, also has received the George Polk Memorial Award, the Mike Berger Award and the Page One Award.
'Wind Quintet IV' by George Perle won the Pulitzer for music. The piece premiered Oct. 2, 1985, at Merkin Concert Hall in Manhattan.
