Louis L'Amour
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louis L'Amour (March 22, 1908 – June 10, 1988) was an American author of primarily Western fiction.
L'Amour's books remain enormously popular, and most have gone through multiple printings.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
He was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore of French-Canadian background March 22, 1908 in Jamestown, North Dakota. The last of seven children born to a veterinarian father and a teacher mother, L'Amour was an avid reader as a child. In the early 1920s, his parents decided to pack up the family and find better economic conditions. When he was 15, he got separated from his family in the American southwest and began to work a string of diverse jobs, which gave him ideas for his fiction. He continued to be an itinerant worker, traveling the world, up to the start of World War II. In 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.
In 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.
Many criticise 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.
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.
[edit] Non-series novels
- Bendigo Schafter
- Brionne
- The Broken Gun
- The Burning Hills
- The Californios
- Callaghen
- Catlow
- Chancy
- The Cherokee Trail
- Comstock Lode
- Conagher
- Crossfire Trail
- Dark Canyon
- Down The Long Hills
- The Empty Land
- Fallon
- The First Fast Draw
- Flint
- Guns of the Timberlands
- Hanging Woman Creek
- The Haunted Mesa
- Heller With a Gun
- The High Graders
- High Lonesome
- Hondo
- Hondo Legacy Edition
- How the West Was Won
- The Iron Marshal
- Key-Lock Man
- Kid Rodelo
- Killoe
- Kilrone
- Kiowa Trail
- Last of the Breed
- Last Stand at Papago Wells
- Lonesome Gods
- A Man Called Noon
- The Man from Skibbereen
- Matagorda
- Passin' Through
- The Proving Trail
- The Quick and the Dead
- Radigan
- Reilly's Luck
- The Shadow Riders
- Shalako
- Showdown at Yellow Butte
- Silver Canyon
- Sitka
- Son of a Wanted Man
- Taggart
- The Tall Stranger
- To Tame a Land
- Tucker
- Under the Sweetwater Rim
- Utah Blaine
- The Walking Drum
- Westward the Tide
- Where the Long Grass Blows
[edit] Sackett novels
In recommended reading order. [1]
- Sackett’s Land
- To the Far Blue Mountains
- The Warrior’s Path
- Jubal Sackett
- Ride the River
- The Daybreakers
- Lando
- Sackett
- Mojave Crossing
- The Sackett Brand
- The Skyliners
- The Lonely Men
- Mustang Man
- Galloway
- Treasure Mountain
- Ride the Dark Trail
- Lonely on the Mountain
There are also two Sackett-related short stories:
- "The Courting of Griselda" (available in End of the Drive)
- "Booty for a Badman" (available in War Party)
[edit] Talon and Chantry novels
- Borden Chantry
- Fair Blows the Wind
- The Ferguson Rifle
- The Man from the Broken Hills
- Milo Talon
- North to the Rails
- Over on the Dry Side
- Rivers West
[edit] Kilkenny novels
- Kilkenny
- The Mountain Valley War
- The Rider of Lost Creek
[edit] Hopalong Cassidy novels (originally published pseudonymously)
- The Riders of High Rock
- The Rustlers of West Fork
- The Trail to Seven Pines
- Trouble Shooter
[edit] Collections of short stories
- Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
- Bowdrie
- Bowdrie's Law
- Buckskin Run
- Collected Short Stories Frontier Vol I
- Collected Short Stories Frontier Vol II
- Collected Short Stories Frontier Vol III
- Dutchman's Flat
- End of the Drive
- From the Listening Hills
- Hills of Homicide
- Law of the Desert Born
- Long Ride Home
- Lonigan
- May There Be a Road
- Monument Rock
- Night Over the Solomons
- Off the Mangrove Coast
- The Outlaws of Mesquite
- The Rider of the Ruby Hills
- Riding for the Brand
- The Strong Shall Live
- The Trail to Crazy Man
- Valley of the Sun
- War Party
- West From Singapore
- West of Dodge
- With These Hands
- Yondering
[edit] Non-fiction books
- Education Of A Wandering Man
- Frontier
- The Louis L'Amour Companion
- The Sackett Companion
- A Trail Of Memories: The Quotations Of Louis L'Amour (compiled by Angelique L'Amour)
[edit] Poetry
- Smoke From This Altar
[edit] Compilations with other authors
- The Golden West
- Stagecoach
