One of the most widely read Western novelists of all time never thought of himself as a Western writer and never planned to write about the West. Yet a few days before he died in 1988, Louis L’Amour learned that his book sales had topped 200 million and surpassed every other author of Western fiction in the history genre.
His life-changing decision to write Westerns came unexpectedly in 1946 during his first night home from military duty in Europe. “Like everybody else who came back from the Army, I had to start over again,” L’Amour said in a video interview still accessible on the official Louis L’Amour website.
An editor he knew invited him to a party in Manhattan. Many writers and editors were guests at the party. One of the editors asked L’Amour what he was going to do now that the war was over. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got to get started writing.”
“Why don’t you write some Westerns for me?” the editor asked. “I need them in the worse way.”
“So I did,” L’Amour said. “They caught on and began to go. I invented the character Chick Bowdrie, a Texas Ranger, and I wrote about 25 or 26 stories about him.”
Because he had never thought of himself as a Western writer, L’Amour had written only one short story in the Western genre prior to the war—“The Town No Guns Could Tame.” Now on his first night home from the war, he was making a life-changing decision.
“I knew if you write Westerns, you write behind the eight-ball,” he said. “Nobody considered them literature.” Writing for paperbacks would also put him “behind the eight-ball” because in those days paperbacks were considered the end of the road.
“So I thought about it and decided I was going to do it,” he said. “I was going to take the ball and run with it and make them like it. I was going to make Western literature important regardless of what they thought about it.”
Starting over and reinventing himself had become a way of life for Louis since his teenage years. After a series of bank failures ruined the economy of the Midwest, he had to drop out of school at age 15 to travel across the country with his parents in a seven-year search for jobs.
Born Louis Dearborn LaMoore in 1908 in Jamestown, N.D., the author had an idyllic childhood before the bank failures. He didn’t change the spelling of his last name until the 1930s. His middle name was handed down from his grandfather, Abraham Truman Dearborn, who lived in a little house behind the LaMoore home. L’Amour’s grandfather had fought Indians in the Dakota Territory, and his great-grandfather had been killed and scalped by Indians.
“The Indians my grandfather fought used to come around and visit him,” L’Amour said. “They’d sit down on the lawn and talk over the old days. After my grandfather died, they never came back again. I missed them very much.”
L’Amour grew up hearing true stories of life on the frontier and his grandfather’s experiences as a soldier in both the Civil War and Indian Wars. In time his mental ability to collect and retain the stories of other people would become the inspiration for his writing. “I always wanted to tell stories,” L’Amour said. “All my life I wanted to write.”

Having been taught the art of boxing, L’Amour fought in the ring for money in the 1920s so his family could buy gas to travel down the road looking for work. He only lost five of 59 fights.
Members of the LaMoore family were intelligent, well-read people, and his father was a large animal veterinarian who had been the state livestock inspector and held positions in city and state government. Most of the seven children had left home before the economic downturn. Only Louis and his adopted brother joined their parents on the road. Louis skinned cattle in West Texas; baled hay in New Mexico; worked mines in Arizona, California and Nevada; and hired on at saw mills and lumber yards in Oregon and Washington.
L’Amour began a lifelong journey of self-education after being forced to withdraw from school when his family left Jamestown. Across many jobs, locations and lifestyles, reading was the one constant in his life. He often went without meals to afford to buy books. He liked to brag that from 1928 until 1942 he worked miserable jobs and lived in skid-row hotels and campgrounds to read more than 150 nonfiction books a year.
Having been taught the art of boxing by his father and older brothers, Louis made extra money from an occasional prizefight. The year after his family left Jamestown, he fought in the ring for money to buy gas so the family could move further down the road. By his own admission, he only lost five of 59 fights and had 34 knockouts.
It was during his years of working odd jobs in various locations that Louis met the wide variety of characters that would later become 19th century characters in his novels and short stories. He was baling hay near Fort Sumner, N.M., when he met George Coe, who lost his trigger finger in the Lincoln County War and rode with Billy the Kid. Working itinerate jobs in Oklahoma he met Emmett Dalton of the notorious Dalton Gang and Bill Tilghman, a former Dodge City marshal. During his years in Arizona, L’Amour met Jeff Milton, a Texas Ranger and Border Patrolman, and Jim Roberts, the last survivor of the Tonto Basin War.
Louis eventually traveled on his own and rode the rails between jobs. He hoboed across the country sleeping in hobo camps with men who had been riding the rails for half a century. He listened to their stories and lesser-known perspectives on famous events, sometimes even professing to have witnessed those events. More than one old-timer intimated that Butch Cassidy did not die in South America but lived a quiet life in the Utah backcountry. Such stories often contradicted the official record and remained questionable, but they helped spark young L’Amour’s imagination about the tales that might have happened.
After his years in hobo jungles, L’Amour circled the globe as a merchant seaman and visited England, Japan, China, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, Egypt and Panama with rough and ready crews of various steamships. He moved back to the United States in 1930 and reunited with his family in Oklahoma, where his oldest brother was a successful reporter for the Oklahoma City newspaper. It was in Oklahoma that he changed the spelling of his name from LaMoore to L’Amour.
L’Amour was able to supplement his income in Oklahoma by training a Golden Gloves team. In 1937, he sold the short story “Gloves for a Tiger” to Thrilling Adventures Magazine. That publication coupled with the 1935 publication of his short story “Anything for a Pal” in True Gang Life gained L’Amour some small recognition for his writing. His recognition continued to grow through the 1930s primarily through writing for pulp magazines. L’Amour published his first book in 1939. Smoke from This Altar was a collection of poetry only published in Oklahoma.
When the United States entered World War II in 1942, L’Amour was inducted into the U.S. Army, went to Officer’s Candidate School and as a second lieutenant commanded a platoon of gas tankers that supplied planes and tanks throughout the fighting in France and Germany. After his discharge, Louis returned home to find that the market for his pulp fiction adventure stories had nearly disappeared. He was forced to consider new options when the opportunity to write Westerns unexpectedly came his way.
His enormous background of personal experience in the West and time spent listening to the old timers gave him a start in the genre. He also researched original documents and tried to find diaries of people who had lived in the West during the 19th century. He read newspapers from that time period and literally saturated himself with Western history.
L’Amour did not simply grant each of his characters a Colt .44 and set them loose in an imaginary Western playground. Instead, he carefully considered the times. “One does not simply dash off a Western,” L’Amour said, adding that anyone who wants to write for a Western audience had better know the details because the audience knows the difference.

The most notable feature of L’Amour’s office was not the mounds of paper but the library walls lined with four sets of double bookshelves 12 feet tall. To allow access to the second set of bookshelves, the outer shelves were mounted on huge hinges to swing outward like a giant set of doors.
Louis began to write Westerns exclusively and in time put out a new short story every week. He published his first Western novel, Westward the Tide, in England in 1950. His hard work and attention to detail finally paid off as he began publishing his stories in highly regarded magazines like Collier’s and placed books with multiple presses, including Bantam and Gold Medal.
The writer’s big break came in 1952 with publication of “The Gift of Cochise” in Collier’s magazine. One of the readers was film legend John Wayne. Wayne purchased the rights to the story with the intent to produce it into a film, but he left L’Amour the rights to expand it into a novel. The movie and the novel were released on the same day in 1954 with the title Hondo. That was the day L’Amour was hurled into the national spotlight.
In 1956 Louis married aspiring actress Katherine Adams and together they traveled throughout the West searching for locations and researching details for his novels. Their son Beau was born in 1961 and their daughter Angelique was born in 1964.
L’Amour’s handling of the landscape in his novels became so accurate that some of his most loyal fans have retraced the steps of his characters on hikes through trails in Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. Part of the thrill for them lies in finding the landmarks, watering holes, and hideouts used by L’Amour’s characters. It is a credit to his writing and knowledge that he enriched his stories with places readers can visit, see and touch.

President Ronald Reagan awarded L’Amour the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. In addition, he received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1982. The two medals are the highest civilian awards in the United States.
Five years after out-selling John Steinbeck’s total of 41.3 million books, Louis sold his 100 millionth book and won the Western Writers of America’s Saddleman Award. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Bendigo Shafter in 1979, and the U.S. Congress voted in 1983 to honor him with the Congressional Gold Medal. In addition, President Ronald Reagan awarded L’Amour the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.
In 1987 Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer. When he learned that surgery was not possible, he began his long-postponed memoir, Education of a Wandering Man. He was editing the book the afternoon he died, June 10, 1988.
At the time of his death, readers were eagerly awaiting further installments of the Sackett, Chantry, and Talon family tales, along with sequels to several novels. Not surprisingly, though, the man who’d lived so many different lives traveling across the country and the world was soon given new life by his son’s work.
In 2018, Beau L’Amour collected and edited many unpublished works of his father and published them in two volumes of Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures. Because Beau included stories that his father started but never finished, the collections reveal more about the writer’s process and interests. They also reveal a greater interest in other types of writing than had been known previously.
In a 2017 interview with The Durango Herald, Beau admitted learning more about his father as he collected the writer’s unpublished work, including “the fact that he was so bad off in the eight or nine months before he sold the story “The Gift of Cochise” that became Hondo, and then the fact that within just a really short period of time—like that summer—his entire career turned around.” Beau said his father “went from going to the park so that he wouldn’t be caught not eating breakfast to having deals with three publishers.”
Beau pointed out that his father’s good fortune as a writer also confined him to some degree by limiting what he was willing to write and able to publish. Once the writer was no longer a vagabond, he felt compelled to write what he could reliably publish, and that was Westerns. To his credit, almost all of his 105 existing works (89 novels, 14 short story collections and two full-length works of nonfiction) were still in print at the time of his death and his Bantam books have never been out of print.