Louis L'Amour

Louis L'Amour (March 22, 1908 – June 10, 1988) was an American author of primarily Western Fiction. He was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore of French-Canadian background March 22, 1908 in Jamestown, North Dakota. L'Amour's books remain enormously popular, and most have gone through multiple printings.

Louis Dearborn L'Amour was not only one of the West's best-selling storytellers, in many ways he typified the consummate Western man, proud of his accomplishments and shy in his remembrances.

L'Amour had a great work ethic and this appeared to be instilled in him as a child by his parents in Jamestown, North Dakota. His father, a veterinarian and farm machinery salesman, was also involved in local politics. Young Louie played cowboys and Indians in the family barn, which served as his father's veterinary hospital, and did more than his share of reading, particularly G. A. Henty, an Englishman who had written of wars through the nineteenth century. L'Amour said "it enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn't have about wars and politics."

L'Amour elevated himself by his boot straps, and in the process left footprints that few writers will be able to fill. Luck had nothing to do with his successes, he said not long before his death in June 1988. "Nor have I had any connections or breaks that I did not create for myself." His self-education resulted in academic boredom, so he left school and Jamestown at 15 after completing the tenth grade.

By hitchhiking and riding the rails, he arrived in Oklahoma City to visit an older brother, who was the governor's secretary, but he soon moved on. He then found work in West Texas skinning cattle that had died from a prolonged drought. His boss was a 79-year-old wrangler, raised by the Apaches, who taught young Louie about tracking and using herbs. His next job was baling hay in New Mexico's Pecos Valley, across the road from Billy the Kid's grave. There he met Judge Cole in Ruidoso and became acquainted with some thirty former gunfighters, rangers, and outlaws in the area.

L'Amour continued as an itinerant worker, traveling the world as a merchant seaman until the start of World War II. During the 1930s he began to sell stories to pulp magazines. After serving in WWII, he continued to write stories for magazines. In the 1950s, he began to sell novels. He eventually wrote more than 100 novels, selling more than 225 million copies that were translated into dozens of languages.

During the 1960s, L'Amour intended to build a working town typical of those of the nineteenth-century Western frontier, with buildings with false fronts situated in rows on either side of an unpaved main street and flanked by wide boardwalks before which, at various intervals, there were watering troughs and hitching posts. The town, to be named Shalako after the protagonist of one of L'Amour's novels, was to have featured shops and other businesses that were typical of such towns: a barber shop, a hotel, a dry goods store, one or more saloons, a church, a one-room schoolhouse, etc. It would have offered itself as a filming location for Hollywood motion pictures concerning the Wild West. However, funding for the project fell through, and Shalako was never built. At one point during his life Louie was a lion tamer.

Many criticize the Western genre, but L'Amour considered himself "just a storyteller, a guy with a seat by the campfire," and at least once related that after he died, he only wanted to be remembered as a good storyteller. Given the fantastic success of his writings, this fate seems secure.

When interviewed not long before his death, he was asked which among his legion of books had he liked best. His reply was, "I like them all. There's bits and pieces of books that I think are good. I never rework a book. I'd rather use what I've learned on the next one, and make it a little bit better. The worst of it is that I'm no longer a kid and I'm just now getting to be a good writer. Just now."

In 1982 he won the Congressional (National) Gold Medal, and in 1984 the Medal of Freedom. L'Amour is also a recipient of the state of North Dakota's Roughrider Award.
L'Amour died on June 10, 1988 and was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. His autobiography detailing his years as an itinerant worker in the west, Education of a Wandering Man, was published posthumously in 1989.