Sometimes, when you look up the author of amazing books you enjoy, you discover he or she lived a startlingly ordinary life. The artistic powerhouse who wrote so eloquently about heroic acts of derring-do or epic romances or brilliant detectives was a normal person. That can be disappointing. But Louis L’Amour is he exception.
In fact, his life might have been more exciting and adventurous than the stories he wrote.
He was born Louis LaMoore in Jamestown, North Dakota, in 1908, the seventh and youngest child of a veterinarian. Louis loved playing outside, and hanging around the cowboys that passed through the area, but he also loved reading books. Although his family didn’t own a large collection, his oldest sister Edna was the librarian at a nearby free library, and young Louis spent hours there inhaling the adventure novels of G. A. Henty, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jack London.
In the 1920s, economic difficulties in the Upper Midwest forced Dr. LaMoore to leave North Dakota in search of work. Louis and his adopted brother John were living at home, so they went with their parents in search of a new life in the Southwest. Louis’s mother had schoolteacher training, and she continued their education while the family traveled. At fifteen years old, Louis worked to help support his family.
For years, the family traveled through Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Nevada. Louis, his brother, and their father worked with cattle, as lumbermen, and even as miners. Louis came into contact with many people who had lived in the American West while it was still wild. He had always loved stories, and he listened eagerly to anything these older Westerners wanted to reminisce about.
Louis had a natural talent for boxing. His father and brothers gave him lessons, and he earned money as a prizefighter to help his family pay the bills. He eventually struck out on his own and began “yondering,” his word for traveling just to experience the world. He rode the rails for a while, worked on steamships that carried him all the way around the globe, and earned money boxing.
In the 1930s, Louis settled in Choctaw, Oklahoma. He found success writing articles about boxing, travel, and poetry, and now focused on learning to write fiction. He changed his last name to the original French spelling, L’Amour, and wrote while working the family farm.
Beginning in 1938, Louis sold stories to “pulp magazines,” cheap fiction magazines printed on low-quality “pulp” paper, and had the occasional story published in prestigious literary journals. He also sometimes left Oklahoma to work as a merchant seaman or take other temporary jobs.
During World War II, he served as an officer in the Transportation Corps and went overseas as part of the 362nd Quartermaster Trucking unit. By the time he was discharged, he had been promoted to First Lieutenant and had briefly served as Company Commander.
After the war ended, he moved to Los Angeles and returned to writing. The adventure stories that had been so popular before the war had fallen out of favor with the reading public, who demanded mysteries and westerns now. He found success selling stories to western pulp magazines and wrote a couple of Hopalong Cassidy novels under the pseudonym Tex Burns, though they were so extensively reworked before publication that he refused to acknowledge them as his own work for the rest of his life.
Pulp magazines were a dying breed, and writing for them didn’t pay much even if you were selling a story a week, so Louis sold a few film and TV show treatments here and there. His big break came when John Wayne and his production partner Robert Fellows read L’Amour’s western story The Gift of Cochise in Colliers and saw its potential. They paid $4,000 for the film rights and agreed he could write the novelization himself. His novel, called Hondo, released on the same day as the film in 1953, and both were hits. Louis L’Amour, western novelist, had arrived.
Louis L’Amour married Katherine Adams in 1956, and they had two children: Beau and Angelique. During the 1950s and ‘60s, he wrote multiple books a year, publishing with several publishing houses at the same time. Publishers frowned on releasing more than one or two books a year by the same author, because they didn’t want to over-saturate their own market. L’Amour circumvented that by refusing to sign any exclusive contracts and writing for all of them. Readers couldn’t get enough of his books, and Bantam Books eventually agreed to publish three or four of his books a year, so he dropped the other publishers and stayed with them.
He wrote staggering numbers of books every year through the 1970s, and this success made him financially stable for the first time in his life. Louis moved to a nicer neighborhood in West Los Angeles, and traveled extensively so he could do research for his books.
In the early 1980s, his popularity reached its high point. Over a hundred million copies of his books had been sold. He became the first novelist to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, followed by the Presidential Medal of Freedom the next year. He continued to write and publish extensively. In 1987, two bouts with pneumonia led to testing that showed he had lung cancer, even though he was not a smoker. It was too widespread for anything but palliative treatment.
L’Amour wrote his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, which he worked at editing even on the day he died. He had learned how to do many things over his long, fascinating life, but quitting wasn’t one of them. ♦
