Birthday: Louis L'Amour maintained, "A good beginning makes a good end."

Louis Dearborn LaMoore (1908-1988)

Author

His New York Times obituary noted few have taken such a circuitous route to a literary career: before his first best-seller- published when he was 45- “he had been a longshoreman, a lumberjack, an elephant handler, a fruit picker and an officer on a tank destroyer in World War II. He had also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, been shipwrecked in the West Indies and been stranded in the Mojave Desert, and had won 51 of 59 fights as a professional boxer.”

The seventh child of a North Dakota homesteader who practiced large animal veterinary medicine and sold farm equipment on the side, Louis LaMoore  was a voracious reader descended from writers; from 1816, he claimed, 33 members of his family had published work.

A wave of bank failures in the post-World War I recession wiped out his dad, however, and from 1923 to 1931, the family worked as itinerant laborers through the West and Southwest. After traveling widely, on his own from his late teens, he resettled with his parents in Choctaw, Oklahoma in the 1930s and set out to write.

The first thing he did was change his name to Louis L’Amour: an odd choice, given that well into his forties he published under pseudonyms, convinced no one would publish anything by a man with a name like that. Maybe it was the time he spent doing courses at the University of Oklahoma, where he said he read Dumas, Balzac, and Hugo before he ever cracked a Zane Grey.

His first book was a volume of poetry, and he found some luck publishing verse, boxing stories, and sections of the WPA guided to Oklahoma. But even in that pulp magazine-rich environment, success was irregular, and it was 1938 before he started making any reasonably regular money.

In 1940 he began writing western fiction and seemed to find a niche, only to be called up for World War II. He continued writing and selling stories, under the pen names Jim Mayo and Tex Burns. In 1952 he published a short story, “The Promise of Cochise,” in Colliers; John Wayne read it and bought the film rights for $4,000. L’Amour retained the novelization rights, turned the screenplay into a book, and when it reappeared as Hondo, Wayne obligingly blurbed it as the best western novel ever.

His timing was perfect. Television was entering its golden age, and its main storyline was the western. “Mr. L'Amour wrote five pages a day, including Sundays and holidays. He worked in a study crammed with more than 8,000 books, diaries, maps and explorers' notebooks. He also had biographical material on 2,000 old gunfighters,” The Times noted. '’'I could sit in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and write with my typewriter on my knees,'' he once said. ''Temperamental I am not.’''

His output exceeded the norms of paperback publishers, who disliked having more than three or four titles a year by the same author. For years, he sold his work to multiple publishers, Gold Medal and Bantam among them, until his sales reached the point that whatever he put out, sold well.

The Times reported,

The typical L'Amour hero was a strapping young man in his late teens or early 20's, a resilient and somewhat romantic fighter bent on self-improvement. Tell Sackett carried law books in his saddlebags; Bendigo Shafter read Montaigne, Plutarch and Thoreau; and Drake Morrel, a one-time riverboat gambler, read Juvenal in the original Latin.

L’Amour had literary aspirations; as time went on he launched an ambitious, multifamily, multigenerational saga of the Sackett clan, to popular acclaim and sales. He complained, however, that western fiction was ever the victim of “pure snobbishness” by the critics.

Like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Erle Stanley Gardner, L’Amour constantly looked for new ways to monetize his work. He was a pioneer in the field of audio books, branching out from the straight, one-voice readings into “audio dramas” with multiple actors and music tracks, like the radio shows he’d grown up with. His writing style was action-oriented and visual, which made his work popular in movies and TV. By the time he died, 44 of his stories and books had been made into one form or the other. He developed a radio program, Louis L’Amour Theatre, which at its peak ran on some 200 stations.

He tried a variety of genres: historical fiction, science fiction (set in the old west, of course), and nonfiction, and left a memoir for posthumous publication. In the Reagan era, L’Amour enjoyed a surge of popularity, becoming the first novelist to be awarded a Congressional Gold Medal. President Reagan himself- who adored L’Amour books- gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.

L’Amour worked until a few weeks before his death in 1988. All of his work was in print: 86 novels, 14 collections of the 250 short stories he wrote, and his nonfiction work. He sold over three hundred million copies, including a vast Time-Life Books uniform edition in leatherette that people persist in thinking valuable.

“I guess I’m an industry,” he summed up.