Louis Dearborn L’amour was born in Jamestown, North Dakota on March 22, 1908. At the age of 15, he left school because of the difficult financial times at home caused by the Great Depression. He was largely a self-taught man who never stopped learning. A voracious reader, his personal library held over 17,000 volumes.
During the Depression, L’amour worked at many different occupations. He worked as a ranch hand, longshoreman and seaman, circling the world on a freighter. He sailed the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies, and stranded in the Mohave Desert.
He also was a lumberjack, assessment miner, elephant handler and even skinned dead cattle for a living. As a prizefighter, he won 51 of 59 fights. During World War II, L’amour served as an officer in the tank corps in France and Germany.
Louis L’amour in Print
Settling in Oklahoma during the 1930s, L’amour sought to make his living through his writing, but the endeavor was interrupted by World War II. Before and after the war, he published work in the pulp magazines of the day. He wrote not only westerns, but detective and adventure fiction as well.
He published his first novel, Hondo, in 1953 and it was made into a film starring John Wayne. How the West was Won, a screenplay he wrote became a best selling novel. He wrote four Hopalong Cassidy novels under the pen name of Tex Burns for Doubleday and Company.
L’amour is best known for his westerns, but he wrote historical novels as well. Some of his non-western novels include Sitka, The Haunted Mesa, The Walking Drum, and Last of the Breed.
L’amour and the Sacketts
His most popular novels are the Sackett stories in which he traces the family’s migration from Europe in the 1600s and follows successive generations as the country expanded westward. Several of his Sackett novels were made into films starring Tom Selleck and Sam Elliot.
He has more than 100 books in print and his work has been translated into 20 languages. More than 45 of his novels and stories have been adapted for television or the big screen. He is considered one of the best selling authors in modern literary history.
In 1983, L’amour was the first novelist to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of his life’s work and later received the Medal of Freedom, both presented to him by Ronald Reagan.
Louis L’amour passed away on June 10, 1988. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man was published posthumously in 1989 and became a best seller.
Sources:
Louis L'amour, Retrieved on 2/27/09.
Lamar, Howard R, ed. The New Encyclopedia of the American West, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.
L'amour, Louis, Education of a Wandering Man, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. New York. 1990.
Matthew Pizzolato - Matthew Pizzolato is a writer of both short stories and articles and has completed two novels, neither of which have been published, but ...
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