(1908-1988) Also wrote as: Tex Burns
L’Amour was touted by his developer as the world’s best-selling author, and there can be no argument that he was very, popular until the day he died and continues to have a large readership. Even as the western genre in topics, magazines, films, and television faded far from its previous position at the center of the popular culture, and the other late-20th-century practitioners of the form eked out their careers in bottom-list anonymity, L’Amour maintained his status as a major brand-name author. Through his grand storytelling talent, his ability to create full-blooded characters who transcended the easy cliches of other writers, his vast knowledge of history, and his longtime developer’s marketing skills, L’Amour came to represent the West and the western as the chronicler of America’s western frontier days, as no other writer—not even the iconic Zane grey or Max brand—ever had. L’Amour’s literary Americana was so venerated in his later years that he received the Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Freedom, the only genre star and former pulp magazine writer to achieve such distinction.
L’Amour—the original family spelling was “LaMoore”—was born in South Dakota, the last of his parents’ seven children. In the early 1900s the Dakotas were not far from their own Wild West days, and the older neighbors of Louis’s youth had vivid memories of early struggles and Indian wars. At 15 he moved with the family to Oklahoma, soaking up more of the lore and feel of the West. His parents were learned and had encouraged his education, but L’Amour wanted adventure and left home as a teenager, wandering the country and then the world, taking up odd and exotic jobs from ditchdigger to elephant walker. For many years he sustained himself as a tank town boxer. The roughneck work coexisted with a literary urge and a sensitivity that led L’Amour to write and self-publish romantic poems. World War II took up his time for several years—he saw extensive combat in Eu-rope—and then, finally, nearing 40, L’Amour devoted himself to writing.
L’Amour began selling to the pulp magazines, writing everything from boxing and exotic adventure stories based on his own experiences to detective mysteries and, of course, westerns. Once he began selling he never stopped. Western magazines were still in abundance in those postwar days even as the other pulp titles began to disappear. L’Amour’s first published novels were pseudonymous assignments, adventures of the long-established Hopalong Cassidy character created by Clarence Mulford. But soon L’Amour would establish his own name as a novelist. In 1953 Gold Medal topics published Hondo, L’Amour’s expanded short story of a rugged cavalry scout, his relationship with a widow and her child, and their battle against the elements and marauding Indians. L’Amour’s popularity as a paperback writer was immediate (the simultaneous hit movie version of Hondo, starring John Wayne, did not hurt the author’s growing reputation). Once established, he would produce three or more topics a year for decades.
While many of L’Amour’s novels were simple action stories that demonstrated his training in the pulps, as the years went on his depiction of the West would grow larger in scope and depth: an epic vision of a nation’s expansion, the vast and varied landscape (from Arizona to Alaska), the anthropology of the frontier emigrants and the native populace, and an almost political endorsement of white Americans’ manifest destiny. With The Daybreakers, published in 1960, L’Amour began the Sackett family saga, his immensely popular series of loosely connected topics that followed the adventures of various and succeeding generations of a frontier family whose stories would encompass all the great themes—and great cliches—of the genre.
At his death in 1988, L’Amour had left many uncollected stories and some unpublished manuscripts, which his heirs have gradually brought into print. Some of these posthumous releases, like the short story collection May There Be a Road (2001), include an element of surprise for longtime fans, with the inclusion of unknown and unexpected L’Amour tales of tough, urban private eyes in the Dashiell hammett tradition.
Works
- Bendigo Shafter (1978);
- Beyond the Great Snow Mountains (2000);
- Bowdrie (1983);
- Bowdrie’s Law (1984);
- Brionne (1971);
- Broken Gun, The (1966);
- Burning Hills, The (1956);
- Californios (1974);
- Callaghen (1972);
- Catlow (1963);
- Chancy (1968);
- Cherokee Trail, The (1982);
- Comstock Lode (1981);
- Conagher (1969);
- Crossfire Trail (1954);
- Dark Canyon (1963);
- Daybreakers (1960);
- Down the Long Hills (1968);
- Dutchman’s Flat (1986);
- Empty Land, The (1969);
- End of the Drive (1997);
- Fallon (1963);
- First Fast Draw, The (1959);
- Flint (1960);
- Galloway (1970);
- Guns of the Timberlands (1955);
- Hanging Woman Creek (1964);
- Haunted Mesa, The (1987);
- Heller with a Gun (1954);
- High Graders, The (1965);
- High Lonesome (1962);
- Hills of Homicide, The (1984);
- Hondo (1953);
- How the West Was Won (1963);
- Iron Marshall, The (1979);
- Jubal Sackett (1985);
- Key Lock Man, The (1965);
- Kid Rodelo (1966);
- Kilkenny (1954);
- Killoe (1962); Kilrone (1966);
- Kiowa Trail (1965);
- Lando (1962);
- Last of the Breed (1986);
- Last Stand at Papago Wells (1957);
- Law of the Desert Born (1983);
- Lonely Men, The (1969);
- Lonely on the Mountain (1980);
- Lonesome Gods, The (1983);
- Long Ride Home (1989);
- Lonigan (1988);
- Man Called Noon, The (1970);
- Man from Shibbereen (1973);
- Matagorda (1967);
- May There Be a Road (2001);
- Mojave Crossing (1964);
- Mountain Valley War, The (1978);
- Mustang Man (1966);
- Night over the Solomons (1986);
- Outlaws of Mesquite (1991);
- Passin’ Through (1985);
- Proving Trail, The (1979);
- Quick and the Dead, The (1973);
- Radi-gan (1958);
- Reilly’s Luck (1970);
- Rider of Lost Creek, The (1976);
- Rider of the Ruby Hills, The (1986);
- Ride the Dark Trail (1972);
- Ride the River (1983);
- Riding for the Brand (1986);
- Sackett (1961);
- Sackett Brand, The (1965);
- Sack-ett’s Gold (1977);
- Sackett’s Land (1974);
- Shadow Riders, The (1982);
- Shalako (1962);
- Silver Canyon (1956);
- Sitka (1957);
- Sky Liners, The (1967);
- Son of a Wanted Man (1984);
- Strong Shall Live, The (1980);
- Taggart (1959);
- Tall Stranger, The (1957);
- To Tame a Land (1955);
- To the Far Blue Mountains (1976);
- Trail to Crazy Man, The (1986);
- Trail to the West, A (1986);
- Treasure Mountain (1972);
- Tucker (1971);
- Under the Sweetwater Rim (1971);
- Walking Drum, The (1984);
- War Party (1975);
- Warrior’s Path, The (1980);
- West from Singapore (1987);
- West of the Pilot Range (1986);
- Westward the Tide (1950);
- Where the Long Grass Blows (1976);
- Yondering (1980)
As Tex Burns
- Hopalong Cassidy and the Riders of High Rock (1951);
- Hopalong Cassidy and the Rustlers of West Fork (1951);
- Hopalong Cassidy, Trouble Shooter (1952)
