Shirleen Davies is under the weather so I'm re-posting an article I wrote quite a while back about oner of my favorite authors, Louis L'Amour.
Who is your favorite western author? Has a western author
influenced you? Louis L’Amour had a tremendous impact on my love of the west.
In a speech at an RWA conference not many years long before he died, he said he
“could write in the median of Hollywood and Vine while sitting in a folding
chair with a typewriter balanced on his knees.” Wow, what concentration! No
wonder Louis L’Amour is called “America’s Storyteller.”
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| Louis L'Amour working on Hondo |
Allegedly Louis L’Amour preferred Sam Elliott and Tom
Selleck play his western heroes. Certainly both have become synonymous with his
work. “Conagher” is one of my favorite movies, and “Crossfire Trail” is
another, although I hated that Mark Harmon played a bad guy.
The man who would become Louis L'Amour grew up in the fading
days of the American frontier. He was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore on March 22,
1908, the last of seven children in the family of Dr. Louis Charles LaMoore and
Emily Dearborn LaMoore. His home, for the first fifteen years of his life, was
Jamestown, North Dakota where Doctor LaMoore was a large animal veterinarian.
Dr. LaMoore changed the spelling of the family surname to L’Amour.
When Louis was very young his grandfather, Abraham Truman
Dearborn, came to live in a little house just in back of the LaMoore's. He told
Louis of the great battles in history and of his own experiences as a soldier
in both the civil and Indian wars. Two of Louis' uncles had worked on ranches
for many years, one as a manager and the other as an itinerate cowboy. It was
in the company of men such as these that Louis was first exposed to the history
and adventure of the American Frontier.
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| Louis L'Amour, age 12 |
Jamestown, North Dakota had provided Louis with an idyllic
childhood but hard times finally uprooted the family and set them on a course
that would forever alter Louis' life. After a series of bank failures ruined
the economy of the upper Midwest, Dr. LaMoore, his wife Emily, and their sons
Louis and John took their fortunes on the road. They traveled across the
country in an often-desperate seven-year odyssey. During this time Louis
skinned cattle in west Texas, baled hay in the Pecos valley of New Mexico,
worked in the mines of Arizona, California, and Nevada, and in the saw mills
and lumber yards of Oregon and Washington.
It was in these various places and while working odd jobs
that young Louis met the wide variety of characters that would later become the
inspiration for his writing. In Oklahoma they were men like Bill Tilghman, once
the marshal of Dodge City; Chris Madsen who had been a Deputy U.S. Marshall and
a Sargent with the 5th cavalry; and Emmett Dalton of the notorious Dalton Gang.
In New Mexico he met George Coe and Deluvina Maxwell who had both known Billy
the Kid; Tom Pickett who'd had a thumb shot off in the Lincoln County War; Tom
Threepersons who had been both a Northwest Mounted Policeman and a Texas
Ranger; and Elfagio Baca, a famous New Mexico lawyer who had once engaged over
eighty of Tom Slaughter's cowboys for 33 hours in one of the west's most famous
gunfights. During his years in Arizona Louis met Jeff Milton, a Texas Ranger
and Border Patrolman and Jim Roberts, the last survivor of the Tonto Basin War
and later Marshall of Jerome. But perhaps most importantly, during the years he
was traveling around the country, young Louis met hundreds of men and women
who, though unknown historically, were equally important as examples of what
the people of the nineteenth century were like.
In the years after leaving Jamestown Louis had a sporadic
career as a professional boxer. Having been well taught by his father and older
brother, Louis made extra money from an occasional prizefight and, in the year
just after his family left Jamestown, he often fought in the ring for the money
to buy gas so that they could move on. On more than one occasion a run of luck
allowed him to box full time. Over the years he spent time in dim gymnasiums in
cities all across the west, first as a boxer, then as second and finally as a
trainer, seeing the world of fighters, managers, gangsters and gamblers first
hand. Louis ended his fighting career by coaching several successful Golden
Gloves teams; the first few in Oklahoma, the last, an army team that went to
the Tournament of Champions in Chicago. Louis freely drew from this experience for
many of the boxing stories in the collections HILLS OF HOMICIDE, BEYOND THE
GREAT SNOW MOUNTAINS and OFF THE MANGROVE COAST.
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| L'Amour as a boxer |
On his own, Louis hoboed across the country, hopping freight
trains with men who had been riding the rails for half a century. He wrapped
newspaper under his clothes to keep warm while sleeping in hobo jungles, grain
bins and the gaps in piles of lumber. He spent three months "on the
beach," in San Pedro, California and circled the globe as a merchant
seaman, visiting England, Japan, China, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Arabia,
Egypt, and Panama with the rough and ready crews of various steamships on which
he served. In later years he wrote stories about these times, his own
experiences and those of people he had known. Many of these stories are now
published in the collection YONDERING and there are two more in OFF THE
MANGROVE COAST. Fiction based on Louis' travels in the Far East can be found in
WEST FROM SINGAPORE, NIGHT OVER THE SOLOMONS, BEYOND THE GREAT SNOW MOUNTAINS,
and OFF THE MANGROVE COAST.
Traveling around the country and working in various remote
locations gave Louis an intimate first-hand knowledge of the territory and
landscape where the majority of his stories would be set. He spent time hiking
around or traveling through what would later be the settings for SACKETT in the
San Juan Mountains of Colorado, BENDIGO SHAFTER in the South Pass area of
Wyoming, SHALAKO in the boot heel of New Mexico, SON OF A WANTED MAN in the
Utah Canyon Lands, TAGGART in central Arizona, Mojave Crossing in the
California desert and Los Angeles, THE MAN CALLED NOON in central New Mexico
and Southern Colorado, PASSIN’ THROUGH in Southwest Colorado, FALLON (one of my
personal favorites) in Northern Nevada, MUSTANG MAN in Northeast New Mexico,
NORTH TO THE RAILS in New Mexico, Texas and Kansas, and THE EMPTY LAND in
Northern Utah.
Though he left school in the 10th grade Louis had a thirst
for knowledge. Throughout his life Louis haunted libraries and bookstores
across the country and all over the world. Often he went without meals in order
to afford to buy books. He sometimes worked long and hard so that he could quit
working temporarily and afford to study full time. Louis liked to brag that
from 1928 until 1942 he read more than 150 non-fiction books a year and that in
order to do it he worked miserable jobs and lived in skid row hotels and
campgrounds.
After several years in the Pacific Northwest, Louis' parents
moved to a little farm that their eldest son, Parker, had purchased in
Oklahoma. John had left Oregon a year before and had not been heard from since
and so it was just the three of them who traveled across Idaho, Wyoming,
Nebraska and Kansas to settle on the acreage outside Choctaw. They had a house,
animals, occasional crops, and their lives returned to normal. They lived in a
community in which they were not viewed as vagabonds. Slowly the LaMoore family
began to put down roots.
Louis always wanted to be a writer but in his early days he
thought that his writing would take the form of poetry. For years he struggled
to learn this craft without much guidance except his own intellect. Eventually,
he broke out into a number of little magazines and began placing poems
regularly. The name Louis L'Amour was seen in public for the first time.
Poetry, however, didn't pay very well. In fact, it didn't pay at all. He tried
writing short stories that drew on his life experience, sending them to collage
journals or literary magazines. This was not the answer to earning a living as
a writer either. Finally, he sold a short story called "Anything for a
Pal" to a pulp magazine called TRUE GANG LIFE. He made less than eight
dollars but he took it as a sign and committed his attention to writing for the
pulps. The hoped for breakthrough took almost two years to come.
In 1937 he sold a short story called "Gloves for a
Tiger" to THRILLING ADVENTURES MAGAZINE and, this time, other sales
followed quickly. Although he wrote in several genres, including a rare western
or two, Louis' most financially successful stories were the adventure tales he
wrote about the captain of a tramp freighter and his crew. Ponga Jim Mayo,
Louis' fictional character, was a merchant captain whose tendency to find
trouble had drawn the attention of a British Intelligence officer. Together,
Mayo and Major Arnold kept agents of the Axis powers off balance in the years
leading up to WWII. Ultimately, Louis did place some material with literary
magazines "The Admiral" was published in STORY, one of the most
prestigious periodicals of it's day; "It's Your Move", "Survival,"
and "Glorious! Glorious!" were published in TANAGER; and "Dead
End Drift" and "Old Doc Yak" were published in the NEW MEXICO
QUARTERLY. His poetry, originally seen in many anthologies and magazines, was
self-published in a collection called, SMOKE FROM THIS ALTAR.
Louis was inducted into the US army late in the summer of
1942. After boot camp he went to Officer's Candidate School and then Tank
Destroyer School. By the time he was eligible to join a TD outfit he was
ordered to change assignments because with his 35th birthday just over six
months away he would be too old to join a combat unit. He joined the
Transportation Corps and was sent to England and then on to Europe with a
trucking company. As a second Lt. he commanded a platoon of gas tankers that
supplied planes and tanks all through the fighting in France and Germany.
Before he returned home he was promoted to 1st Lt. and was briefly a company
commander. While in Europe he gathered the background that he later used in his
stories about that area. He visited many of the locations that appear in
“Meeting in Falmouth” (collected in BEYOND THE GREAT SNOW MOUNTAINS), THE
WALKING DRUM, SACKETT’S LAND, and TO THE FAR BLUE MOUNTAINS. He met the people
who were models for the characters in “A Friend of the General” (collected in
YONDERING), REILLY’S LUCK, KIOWA TRAIL and “The Cross and the Candle”
(collected in OFF THE MANGROVE COAST).
After his discharge Louis returned to the U.S. only to find
that the market for his Adventure stories had nearly disappeared. Now editors
were asking for Mysteries and Westerns. Because of Louis' background, an old
friend in the publishing business pushed him in the direction of Westerns.
Following his friend's advice, Louis L'Amour moved to Los Angeles, a city he
knew well from his sea-faring and boxing days, settled into a small room in the
back of another family's large apartment and began to write. For the first
couple of years he sat on the bed and worked with his typewriter sitting on a
folding chair. Compared to his Oklahoma days his output was enormous. In one
year he sold almost a story a week and wrote even more than that. The pulps had
never paid very well and that situation had not changed much. Louis' average
take on a short story was less than $100.
By the early 1950s, pressured by radio, TV, and the
paperback book, the pulp magazines, which had published a majority of the
fiction in the United States, began to go out of business. Many writers, Louis
included, found it harder and harder to sell their stories. Like others Louis
tried many different markets. He sold "Westward the Tide" to a
British publisher. Four Hopalong Cassidy novels went to a short lived magazine
based on Clarence Mulhford's character, and "The Gift of Cochise,"
"Get out of Town," "Booty for a Badman," "THE BURNING
HILLS," and "WAR PARTY," to what were called the
"slick" magazines like COLLIERS and THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.
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| Playbill for Crossfire Trail starring Tom Selleck, one of L'Amour's favorite actors |
Louis had already sold several novels (WESTWARD THE TIDE,
his four Hopalong Cassidy stories, CROSSFIRE TRAIL, UTAH BLAINE, and SILVER
CANYON) to paperback publishers when “Hondo,” a film made from his short story
“Gift of Cochise” (collected in WAR PARTY) hit the silver screen. Also prior to
the release of “Hondo,” he had sold several other projects for movies and TV. In
1951 a couple of episodes of Cowboy G-Men were made from his treatments and he
sold a series pilot called “One Night Stand” (collected in THE STRONG SHALL
LIVE) to Bing Crosby. He also sold a story to Fireside Theater and the
treatment for the feature EAST OF SUMATRA to Universal International. But it
was the success of “Hondo” that gave Louis' career a much-needed boost.
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| Playbill for Conagher starring Sam Elliott, the other of L'Amour's favorite actors |
In 1956 Louis L'Amour married Katherine Elizabeth Adams, an
aspiring actress. The daughter of a resort developer and silent movie star, Kathy
had grown up in the deserts and mountains of Southern California where her
father had once owned vast tracts of land. Together Katherine and Louis
traveled all over the west searching out locations and doing research for
Louis' books. In 1961 their son Beau was born and in 1964 they had a daughter,
Angelique.
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| Louis and Katherine -- doesn't he look happy? |
The 1960s were a productive time for Louis. He developed his
famous Sackett family series, traveled extensively to promote books and movies,
and, for the first time in his life, bought a house. He was often invited to
speak at public forums and held book signings for large crowds all across the
country. And he finally settled down to
work with a single publisher, Bantam Books.
After six years (1953 -1959) of going back and forth between
Fawcett/Gold Medal, Ace and Bantam, Louis was looking to find a publisher who
would bring out more than two of his books per year. His editor at Gold Medal lobbied to let him
write more but management refused even though he was placing books with
competing publishers. L’Amour had sold
14 novels, 9 motion pictures, and several million paperback copies before
Bantam Editor in Chief Saul David was finally able to convince his company to
offer Louis an exclusive contract that would expand to three books a year. It was only after 1960, however, that Louis’s
sales at Bantam began to surpass his sales at Gold Medal.
A book contract with Bantam kept him motivated and on a
deadline. Louis expanded the Sackett family series to include the family's
beginnings on the American continent and also began the process of weaving in
tales of the Chantry and Talon clans too. The vision of a large matrix of
fiction interwoven with the history of the United States and Canada began to
appear in his work. Plans, many that did not come to fruition for another ten
years, for writing historical fiction (like THE WALKING DRUM, a story written
in the1960s but not sold until the mid '80s.) and even science or fantasy
fiction (THE HAUNTED MESA) were carefully made. By 1973 his new found wealth
allowed Louis to move into a better neighborhood in West Los Angeles. Louis
felt independent and secure for the first time in his adult life. He was
sixty-five years old.
Even before the height of his success in the 1980s, jealousy
caused controversy among other writers of westerns. A rumor was circulated that somehow Louis was
a creation of his publisher, Bantam Books, and that they told him what to write
and then gave him preferential treatment over other writers when it came to
money and advertising. In truth, Louis
wrote in a manner that was very much like stream of consciousness and it was
nearly impossible for him to plan what was going to happen in one of his books
let alone take direction from someone else.
Even in the early 1970s, Bantam Books was still lagging in
the area of public relations, it took a publicity trip to England and the
exemplary efforts of L’Amour’s British publisher Corgi, to focus their
attention on what could be done. For the
most part the publicity effort that defined Louis’s career until the mid ‘70s
was the work he did on his own, learned through hard experience promoting both
boxers and his own book of poetry in the 1930s.
Publishers then, as now, spent next to nothing unless they absolutely
had to.
The hard feelings seem to have culminated with the story
that Bantam required independent distributors to buy titles in lots of 10,000
copies if they wanted access to other Bantam titles at wholesale prices, and
that they kept all of L’Amour’s books in print at all times … thus forcing
other authors off the racks in the Western sections of bookstores.
“There were occasionally additional price incentives offered
to distributors who sold certain amounts of the entire Bantam catalogue,”
George Fisher, who worked at Ludington News in Detroit, the number two
independent distributor in the country, remembers. “But selling Louis was often the way that a
distributor could meet their quotas, because he was so popular. Louis wasn’t a problem for us, he was a
solution.”
The problem seemed to be one of jealousy and
misinterpretation, writers with fewer titles and less popular books could get
squeezed where shelf space was limited. But no publisher could afford to keep
books in print that weren’t selling, the book stores would simply return them
for a refund. Whatever the effect, Louis L’Amour was not the beneficiary of any
sort of special, and exclusive, distribution policy.
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| Theodore Roosevelt Award |
In addition to pleasing millions of fans, Louis won the
Western Writers of America's Golden Spur Award for DOWN THE LONG HILLS, North
Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award, his novels HONDO and FLINT are
voted places in the 25 best Western Novels of all time. Five years after out
selling John Steinbeck's total of 41,300,000 copies (a Bantam record) Louis
L'Amour sold his one hundred millionth book and had won the Western Writer's of
America's Golden Saddleman Award. Louis' books have been translated into over
fifteen foreign languages and are sold in English in almost a dozen countries.
Starting in 1966 he would take his family to spend the
summer in Durango, CO, a place he had visited briefly with a mining buddy in
the in the late 1920s. For over ten years they spent the month of August at the
Strater Hotel, Louis dividing his time between writing in a corner room over
the Diamond Belle Saloon and hiking in the La Plata or San Juan Mountains. In
later years he participated in the Presidential Committee on Space, a
Ute/Commanche peace treaty, and was on the National Board of the Library of
Congress' Center for the Book. In 1982 he won the Congressional (National) Gold
Medal, and in 1984 President Ronald Reagan awarded L'Amour the Presidential
Medal of Freedom. In May 1972 he was awarded an Honorary PhD by Jamestown
College, as a testament to his literary and social contributions
The summer of 1987 Louis caught pneumonia. In a few weeks he
threw it off and was seemingly healthy until late fall, when he caught it
again. The first round of tests showed nothing but ultimately a needle biopsy
caught malignant cancer cells. Going back through the x-rays, doctors
discovered a thin veil of cancerous material running throughout his lungs.
Because the cancer was not localized in any one spot, surgery was not possible.
He began his long postponed memoir, EDUCATION OF A WANDERING MAN. As the
disease progressed Louis moved his work from his office to a desk in an
upstairs bedroom and ultimately into the master bedroom. He was editing the
book the afternoon that he died. A few days before he passed away Louis was notified
that sales of his books had topped two hundred million.
"His death was a tragedy to anyone who admired
literature, he showed people what a good story can do, whether it was an escape
from the everyday life or just a bedside companion. His stories painted a
picture in your mind that pleased anyone 8-80 years old, male or female. His
writings could teach life lessons or bring people closer together like it did
between my father and I. His work can take you on an adventure unlike others to
which the average person is subject. In a world that is so
"high-tech" it’s a great feeling when you pick up a L'Amour book and
are taken on an adventure-filled ride through the world of literature." -
S.J. Reese
He died doing what he loved, writing a book at his ranch in
Hesperus, Colorado. He acquired the ranch from a family local to the San Juan
region. Since his death in June of 1988 Bantam Books has continued to release
the work of Louis L'Amour. SMOKE FROM THIS ALTAR, his 1939 book of poetry, and
a revised version of YONDERING, were released in the same year. Since then
there have been re-releases of the four Hopalong Cassidy novels, and many books
of his short stories, some containing material never before published. In the
years since his death in 1988, over one hundred and twenty million copies of
his books have been sold. None of Louis L’Amour’s Bantam titles have ever been
out of print.
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| America's Storyteller, Louis L'Amour |
Much more information on this remarkable man is available on
his official website, www.louislamour.com and on Wikipedia. Additional
information includes the audio productions of son Beau L’Amour and tributes by
daughter Angelique L’Amour.
“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives
that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible
number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”
Louis L'Amour
“Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate,
and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.”
Louis L'Amour
“No one can get an education, for of necessity education is
a continuing process.”
Louis L'Amour
There’s something about reading a Louis L’Amour novel that
dissipates stress and care. Hero and I have each of the L'Amour novels in our keeper shelves. We re-read them
from time to time.
Louis L'Amour knew exactly how to tell a story!
