Louis L'Amour

Louis Dearborn L’Amour, born Louis Dearborn LaMoore on March 22, 1908, in Jamestown, North Dakota, became one of the world’s most popular writers by the time of his death on June 10, 1988. He was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for books set in the American West, though he preferred to call them “frontier stories.” His fiction reached readers through pulp magazines, paperbacks, and films, carrying the old frontier into a modern age of mass publishing and screen Westerns.

L’Amour’s best-known Western works include Last of the Breed, Hondo, Shalako, and the Sackett series. He also wrote outside the Western form, including the historical novel The Walking Drum, the science-fiction novel The Haunted Mesa, the nonfiction work Frontier, and collections of poetry and short stories. Many of his stories were made into films. At his death, almost all of his 105 existing works, made up of 89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length nonfiction books, were still in print.

The roots of his fiction were laid early. Jamestown was farm country, but cowboys and livestock often passed through on the way to or from Montana ranches and eastern markets. As a boy, L’Amour played “Cowboys and Indians” in the family barn, which also served as his father’s veterinary hospital. He spent much of his free time at the Alfred E. Dickey Free Library, reading the work of G. A. Henty. He later said those books sent him to school with more knowledge of wars and politics than even some of his teachers had.

After bank failures damaged the economy of the upper Midwest, his family left North Dakota in 1923. Over the next seven or eight years, L’Amour worked and traveled widely: skinning cattle in west Texas, baling hay in New Mexico, working in mines in Arizona, California, and Nevada, and in sawmills and lumber camps in the Pacific Northwest. He also worked as a mine assessment worker, professional boxer, and merchant seaman, visiting all the western states as well as England, Japan, China, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, and Panama. The people he met in those years later helped shape the characters in his novels, including actual Old West figures who had lived into the 1920s and 1930s.

L’Amour settled with his parents in Choctaw, Oklahoma, in the early 1930s and changed his name to the original French spelling, L’Amour. He wrote poetry, boxing articles, and parts of the WPA Guide Book to Oklahoma, while sending out short stories with little early success. By 1938 his work was appearing more regularly in pulp magazines. During World War II he served in the United States Army as a lieutenant with the 362nd Quartermaster Truck Company, then returned to magazine writing after his discharge in 1946.

In the 1950s, L’Amour began selling novels. Westward The Tide, published in 1951, was his first novel under his own name. His short story “The Gift of Cochise” led to the film and novel Hondo in 1953, with John Wayne calling it the finest Western he had ever read. Readers still return to L’Amour because his work was built from books, labor, travel, war service, and close attention to working people. His frontier stories carry the feel of lived experience, told plainly and with force.