Louis L'Amour

It's the birthday of novelist Louis L'Amour, born in Jamestown, North Dakota (1908). One of the hardest working and best-selling novelists ever, he wrote a hundred and one books in his lifetime.

He knew he wanted to be a writer from the time that he could walk. So L'Amour quit school when he was fifteen and traveled around the West working as an animal skinner, ranch hand and lumberjack.

Wherever he went, he got people to tell him their own stories and whatever stories they knew about the Old West. Once, he met a gunman who had ridden with Billy the Kid and who had gone on to sell real estate.

In the early 1930s, L'Amour hopped an East African Schooner and made his way from Africa to Asia. He lived with bandits in the mountains of China and then started boxing professionally in Singapore. He won thirty-four of his fifty-nine boxing matches by knockout.

When L'Amour got back to the United States he started writing for pulp fiction magazines because he needed money and the pulp magazines paid him the fastest. He wrote all kinds of adventure stories, but eventually settled on westerns.

L'Amour's first big success was Hondo (1953), about a love triangle between a cowboy, an Apache warrior and a young widow living on a remote Arizona ranch. It begins, "He rolled the cigarette in his lips, liking the taste of the tobacco, squinting his eyes against the sun glare."

In Ride the Dark Trail (1972), L'Amour wrote, "I just pointed my rifle at him ... and let him have the big one right through the third button on his shirt. If he ever figured to sew that particular button on again he was going to have to scrape it off his backbone."

For further reading, see his autobiography Education of a Wandering Man.

taken from today's edition of The Writer's Almanac


L'Amour said, "I write about hard-shelled men who built with nerve and hand that which the soft-bellied latecomers call the 'western myth.'"