Louis L'Amour

L’Amour married Katherine Elizabeth Adams, on February 19, 1956. They had two children: Beau Dearborn and Angelique Gabrielle (Contemporary Authors, 25).

Young Louie enjoyed playing cowboys and Indians, and roughhoused in the family barn. He did more than his share of reading, particularly G.A. Henty, an Englishman who wrote of wars through the nineteenth century. His work ethic was instilled by his parents. The L’Amour family library encompassed some five hundred books, among them the works of Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, and Poe, as well as popular American and English writers. The youngest of the L’Amour children, Louie remembered reading a five-volume Collier’s History of the World while he was small enough to sit in his father’s lap.

His serious reading began at twelve with a collection of biographies titled The Genius of Solitude. A book of natural history followed, which he tried unsuccessf

Louis L’Amour was one of the most popular writers in the world and stressed the fact he had never taken a creative writing course, and that his post tenth grade education had been earned from voluminous reading. L’Amour wrote more than one hundred books, including eighty-six novels, fourteen short story collections and one nonfiction-a chronicle of life on the American frontier. All of his books are in print, reflecting sales of two hundred million copies in twenty languages. L’Amour has also published hundreds of stories in at least eighty magazines in the United States abroad. His wife, Kathy, proofread his work, checking for typos and redundancies. She rarely found misspelled words and no one changed his work, not even editors.

ully to locate years later for his children (Contemporary Authors, 25). During adolescence, L’Amour immersed himself in books of chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and the history of aircraft. His concentrated self-education resulted in boredom with school. L’Amour left school and Jamestown at fifteen, after completing the tenth grade. Since crop failures were common in North Dakota, and his father’s livelihood was linked to the farming community, he decided to find his niche elsewhere. 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 (Hall).

“By then I was broke and I got a job in West Texas skinning dead cattle that died from a prolonged drought. They had been dead a while. Some fellow was trying to save the hides and it was the most miserable job, but I learned a lot” (Larson 4). The young man’s boss was a seventy-nine-year-old wrangler raised by Apaches, who had ridden on war parties with Nana and Geronimo. L’Amour left his odorous job, after three months sleeping on the ground and staying downwind from passerby. He had helped skin 965 head of cattle by staking their skulls and tying their hides to the bumper of an early model pickup truck.

While wandering about the West, he joined a circus in Phoenix, leaving three weeks later to El Paso. He then hoboed his way to Galveston, Texas, where he hired on as a merchant seaman. His first cruise was to the West Indies, his second to the British Isles. He tired his hand at writing during his travels, but his scribblings didn’t include events as familiar as his Western heritage (Hall).

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