By Photo: Tony Webster / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Louis L’Amour was the most widely read Western writer of the 20th century. His publisher, Bantam Books, has put the number of his books in print in the hundreds of millions, and nearly all of them are still available. His reputation rests on a simple promise to readers: that the trails, springs and mountain passes in his novels were real places he had seen.
Early life
He was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore on March 22, 1908, in Jamestown, North Dakota. He left home as a teenager and worked a long list of jobs, including as a ranch hand, miner, lumberjack and merchant seaman, and he boxed professionally for a time. He served in the U.S. Army in World War II. He later wrote about these years, and about the reading he did along the way, in his memoir Education of a Wandering Man, published in 1989.
The books
L’Amour began by writing short stories for pulp magazines. His breakthrough came in 1953 with Hondo, published alongside the John Wayne film of the same story. Over the next three decades he wrote more than 100 books, including some 90 novels and many story collections. The best known are the Sackett novels, which follow a single family across generations from Elizabethan England to the American West. Other well-known titles include Flint, Conagher, Shalako and Crossfire Trail.
Colorado ties
Many of L’Amour’s novels are set in Colorado, especially in the San Juan Mountains, and he owned a ranch near Hesperus in La Plata County in southwest Colorado, where he spent summers writing. His habit of checking locations in person is part of why readers trust his geography, even when his plots are pure adventure.
Honors
In 1983 Congress awarded L’Amour a Congressional Gold Medal, and in 1984 President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died on June 10, 1988, in Los Angeles.
Where to start
New readers often start with Hondo or with The Daybreakers, the Sackett novel that introduces Tyrel and Orrin Sackett. Several of his books became films and TV movies; see our guide to Tom Selleck’s Westerns, which include two L’Amour adaptations.
Source material: Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man (Bantam, 1989); Penguin Random House / Bantam author biography; U.S. Congress, Congressional Gold Medal recipients; Presidential Medal of Freedom records.
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