Louis L'Amour

American novelist and short-story writer

• Born: March 22, 1908
• Birthplace: Jamestown, North Dakota
• Died: June 10, 1988
• Deathplace: Los Angeles, California

Biography

Louis L’Amour (lah-MOHR), a best-selling American author of Western and frontier fiction, was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore. His father was a veterinarian, chief of police, and farm-machinery salesman. His mother wanted to be a teacher and poet but became a devoted mother of seven. Louis was the youngest.

Although he relished reading, LaMoore quit school in 1923. He became a cattle skinner in Texas, a farmer in New Mexico, a circus hand and performer, boxer, and sailor. In 1935, he sold a story to True Gang Life and in 1939 published (the possibly self-financed) Smoke from This Altar, a collection of his poetry. L'Amour was a veteran of World War II (1939–45); he served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1946, part of the time in France and Germany, in transportation and the tank-destroyer corps.

Early in 1946, LaMoore settled in Los Angeles. He wrote detective, action, and Western fiction as Jim Mayo for pulp magazines, and contracted to write—as Tex Burns—four Hopalong Cassidy novels in the restrictive style of Clarence Mulford, Hopalong’s deceased creator. In 1950, LaMoore, now calling himself Louis L’Amour, published Westward the Tide, his first Western novel. In 1952, Collier’s published his story “The Gift of Cochise.” From it, James Edward Grant created the screenplay for the 1953 film Hondo, starring John Wayne. L’Amour novelized the scenario into Hondo, published by Fawcett in 1953. It was a smashing success. L’Amour’s career was launched.

In the next four years, L’Amour published nine routine Westerns, two as Jim Mayo and all with accurate historical data as background but without necessary revisionary and editorial care. Still, they were popular successes. In 1956, L’Amour married Katherine Elizabeth Adams, a television actress twenty-six years his junior. Kathy became the mother of Beau Dearborn and Angelique Gabrielle.

In 1957, L’Amour published Sitka, a romantic historical novel about diplomatic, political, and commercial intrigues while the United States was obtaining Alaska from Russia. Having contracted to furnish Bantam Books two to three novels a year, L’Amour continued writing furiously, typing every morning before lunching with friends. Radigan was his first Western with Bantam, followed by two more which were equally unpromising. Then came The Daybreakers, the first of seventeen Sackett family novels.

L’Amour’s Sackett saga was his most ambitious project to date. Sackett’s Land follows the Hackett family from England in 1599 to the Carolinas. L’Amour planned more novels casting Sacketts from the American Revolution era into and past the Civil War. The family ultimately included more than fifty named characters, representing five succeeding generations, and spread from Tennessee to the Southwest, Mexico, and Canada.

Not content with one multivolume family saga, L’Amour also wrote about two other families. The first of five novels about Chantrys (generally scholars of Irish extraction) is North to the Rails. The earliest chronologically is Fair Blows the Wind , a swashbuckler story beginning in sixteenth century Ireland. The best of three novels about Talons (primarily builders) is Rivers West, concerning a Canadian-born carpenter’s adventures shortly after the Louisiana Purchase.

In 1974, at age sixty-six, L’Amour boldly announced plans for forty-plus novels interlocking Sacketts, Chantrys, and Talons as they pushed the frontier west. By then he had published only fourteen titles in his three-family mega-saga. He continued to write nonsaga novels and, with The Riders of Lost Creek, reintroduced cowboy Lance Kilkenny, first seen in Kilkenny and last seen in The Mountain Valley War. Moreover, Bendigo Shafter, a well-shaped blockbuster Western destined for classic status, dramatizes town-building Wyoming pioneers unconnected to previously mentioned families. With Comstock Lode, L’Amour continued his temporary escape from formulary and family fiction alike; here he brilliantly combines mining-field and San Francisco local-color touches with his hero’s vengeance quest. In The Lonesome Gods, L’Amour poignantly thickens complicated plotting with assorted American Indian myths and legends, including an evil Spaniard, a gigantic human, a wild stallion, a ghost, eerie footprints, and soaring eagles.

L’Amour’s most ambitious departures from the formulary were The Walking Drum, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. The Walking Drum, which L’Amour did not live to make part of an intended trilogy, recounts a twelfth century superhero’s adventures across Europe, mainly in Moorish Spain, Russia, Constantinople, and the Seljuk Empire. Last of the Breed details a Sioux-Cheyenne U.S. Air Force pilot’s escape from villainous Soviet captors and his survival skills through Siberia to the Bering Strait. The Haunted Mesa, a spotty fantasy but another best-seller, concentrates on American Indian supernaturalism, with ancient Cliff Dwellers in what is now the Southwest’s Four Corners (where L’Amour developed two of his four lavish residences).

By 1975, Bantam reported more than forty million L’Amour books in print, a total exceeding those of John Steinbeck, previously its most profitable author. In 1980, L’Amour celebrated one hundred million books in print. Figures soon more than doubled that total. In many years, avid readers were buying more than fifteen thousand L’Amour books every day. Dozens of L’Amour plots were converted into film and television adaptations, the best being Hondo, Shalako (1968, starring Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot), and The Sacketts (a 1979 television miniseries). In 1983, L’Amour heard that Carroll & Graf, fledgling publishers, were about to issue Law of the Desert Born and The Hills of Homicide, containing stories L’Amour had carelessly neglected to recopyright. He sued and settled out of court. Carroll & Graf not only published both collections but also, in 1986, Riding for the Brand and, as Man Riding West, the contents of Dutchman’s Flat.

In addition to several accolades by his peers, L’Amour was awarded a National Gold Medal (1982) and a Presidential Medal of Freedom (1984). Dozens of audiotape adaptations of L’Amour writings contributed to his multimillionaire status and, after his death from lung cancer in 1988, continued to enrich his wife, editor son, and actress daughter, who, together with his publisher, kept his novels in print and pleased the public with new assemblies of his half-forgotten short stories and early works. They helped preserve L’Amour's legacy as what he always defined himself as being—a natural-born teller of a thousand captivating stories.

Bibliography

Barron, James. “Louis L'Amour, Writer, Is Dead; Famed Chronicler of West Was 80.” The New York Times, 13 June 1988, www.nytimes.com/1988/06/13/obituaries/louis-l-amour-writer-is-dead-famed-chronicler-of-west-was-80.html. Accessed 14 Sept. 2022.

“Biography.” The Official Louis L'Amour Website, www.louislamour.com/aboutlouis/biography.htm. Accessed 14 Sept. 2022.

Gale, Robert L. Louis L’Amour: Revised Edition. Twayne, 1992.

Hall, Hal W. The Work of Louis L’Amour: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide. Borgo Press, 1991.

Hinds, Harold E., Jr. “Mexican and Mexican-American Images in the Western Novels of Louis L’Amour.” Southwestern American Literature, vol. 10, Spring,1985, pp. 129–41.

Marsden, Michael T. “Louis L’Amour.” In Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain. Greenwood Press, 1982.

Weinberg, Robert, ed. The Louis L’Amour Companion. Andrews and McMeel, 1992.