Louis L'Amour Biography and List of Works

Popular American writer of Westerns. L'Amour was the most significant writer of the genre since the 1950s. His publishing numbers surpassed Frederick Faust (Max Brand), while his popularity rivalled Zane Grey. Hailed on one book cover as the 'World's Greatest Writer', L'Amour sold over 225 million copies, making him the third top-seller in the world (according to Saturday Review). L'Amour's books have been translated into dozens of languages and made into 30 films.

"I am probably the last writer who will ever have known the people who lived the frontier life. In drifting about across the West, I have known five men and two women who knew Billy the Kid, two who rode in the Tonto Basin war in Arizona, and a variety of others who were outlaws, or frontier marshals like Jeff Milton, Bill Tilghman, and Chris Madse, or just pioneers."
(from Education of a Wandering Man, 1989)

L'Amour was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. The family name was originally L'Moore or Larmour, reflecting his French-Canadian background. His father had many occupations, including a salesman of farm machinery, a veterinarian, a police chief, and a teacher. L'Amour's mother was trained as a teacher, and she was also an amateur poet. The future author was raised hearing stories of pioneers and Native Americans. He began reading earlier than most - from his parent's bookshelf he found collections of Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Emerson. All the family had library cards.

From the ages of fifteen to nineteen L'Amour worked at a variety of jobs: he tried boxing, worked as a circus hand, a lumberjack, and a seaman, and travelled in the Far East, China, and Africa. He was even an elephant handler for a while. During the 1930s he became a successful boxer and travelled in Asia. After returning to the United States he took some creative writing courses at the University of Oklahoma, and started his career as a book reviewer.

During World War II L'Amour served in a tank destroyer unit in France and in Germany. In 1946 he settled in Los Angeles and wrote Western stories for pulp magazines. He had sold his first story in 1935. It was a gangster story, 'Anything for a Pal', published in True Gang Life. L'Amour's early tales were not of the West, but of the Far East or of the prize ring. But the West was where he had grown up and it was an easy step for him to write about the frontier. L'Amour's first novel, WESTWARD THE TIDE (1950) appeared in England. It was not published in the United States until Bantam Books acquired the rights many years later. In 1951 appeared L'Amour's first Western, HOPALONG CASSIDY AND THE RIDERS OF HIGH ROCK, under the pen name Tex Burns.

"Usually I am characterized as a western writer. I do not mind the term, but it is not strictly correct. To me, and to many others, I am a writer of the frontier, not only in the West but elsewhere."
(from The Education of a Wandering Man)

After the 1950s at the top of his career L'Amour published several western novels in a year, of which probably the best known is HONDO (1953). Hondo Lane has killed the degenerate husband of the woman he loves and he is torn between his independence and an emerging desire to settle down. Repeatedly using his popular formula, L'Amour was accused of conventionalism and producing standard novels without much ambition. The well-structured SITKA (1957) was a historical novel with a sailor for hero. THE BROKEN GUN (1966), partly autobiographical, was L'Amour's effort to cast a novel in the 20th century. However, his book THE LAST OF THE BREED (1986) opened a new direction for narrative: the protagonist was a part-Indian pilot who was shot down over Siberia. In order to escape the KGB and live off the frozen tundra, he calls on his Indian skills.

L'Amour's early works were entertaining in the unbridled violence and directness of morality, with necessary amount of Western trivia and lore. During his later phase, from the 1970s, he began to write a series of books about three families - the Sackets, Talons and Chanteys. The Sackets series started in 1960 with THE DAYBREAKERS, and continued for some eighteen books, following the history of the family from Elizabethan England, when the first Sackett sailed from Wales, to the Far West of the 1870s.

In 1981 L'Amour was one of the five best-selling authors still working, in company with Harold Robbins, Barbara Cartland, Irving Wallace, and Janet Dailey. He reached a wider audience for western stories than any of the other great names: Zane Grey, Max Brand, or Ernest Haycox.

At the time of his death it was estimated that L'Amour had published 101 novels, short story collections, poetry and non-fiction. In spite of his reputation as the ultimate western storywriter, L'Amour's first book, published in 1939, was a collection of poems. Several of his novels were also adapted for the screen. L'Amour was an avid reader and in EDUCATION OF A WANDERING MAN (1989) he gives a colourful picture of his adventurous early years, which were also years of reading. "Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him." L'Amour's reading list included such classics as Byron's Don Juan, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island - in 1930 he read 115 books and plays, among them Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Sax Rohmer's The Daughter of Fu Manchu, and Eugene O'Neill's The Long Voyage Home.

For further reading: The American Western Novel by James K. Folsom (1966); The Popular Western, ed. by Richard W. Etulain and Michael T. Marsden (1974); Louis L'Amour by J.C. Elton (1976); The Western, ed. by James K. Folsom (1979); Critical Essays on the Western American Novel, ed. by William T. Pilkington (1980); The Pulp Western by John A. Dinan (1983); Louis L'Amour Checklist by Jedediah Class (1983); Selling the Wild West by Christine Bold (1987); West of Everything by Jane Tompkins (1992); The Louis L'Amour Companion by Robert Weinberg (paperback 1992); Louis L'Amour: His Life and Trails by Robert Phillips; Louis L'Amour by Robert L. Gale; The Work of Louis L'Amour: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide by Hal W. Hall - See also: Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Frederick Marryat, Karl May - Classical roots of the Western hero: Virgil's Aeneid

Books by Louis L'Amour