Long Fiction:
Westward the Tide, 1950
Hopalong Cassidy and the Rustlers of West Fork, 1951 (as Tex Burns)
Hopalong Cassidy and the Trail to Seven Pines, 1951 (as Burns)
Hopalong Cassidy and the Riders of High Rock, 1951 (as Burns)
Hopalong Cassidy, Trouble Shooter, 1952 (as Burns)
Hondo, 1953
Showdown at Yellow Butte, 1953 (as Jim Mayo)
Utah Blaine, 1954 (as Mayo)
Crossfire Trail, 1954
Kilkenny, 1954
Heller with a Gun, 1955
Guns of the Timberlands, 1955
To Tame a Land, 1955
The Burning Hills, 1956
Silver Canyon, 1956
Sitka, 1957
Last Stand at Papago Wells, 1957
The Tall Stranger, 1957
Radigan, 1958
The First Fast Draw, 1959
Taggart, 1959
The Daybreakers, 1960
Flint, 1960
Sackett, 1961
Shalako, 1962
Killoe, 1962
High Lonesome, 1962
Lando, 1962
Fallon, 1963
How the West Was Won, 1963
Catlow, 1963
Dark Canyon, 1963
Mojave Crossing, 1964
Hanging Woman Creek, 1964
Kiowa Trail, 1964
The High Graders, 1965
The Sackett Brand, 1965
The Key-Lock Man, 1965
The Broken Gun, 1966
Kid Rodelo, 1966
Mustang Man, 1966
Kilrone, 1966
The Sky-Liners, 1967
Matagorda, 1967
Down the Long Hills, 1968
Chancy, 1968
Brionne, 1968
The Empty Land, 1969
The Lonely Men, 1969
Conagher, 1969
The Man Called Noon, 1970
Galloway, 1970
Reilly’s Luck, 1970
North to the Rails, 1971
Under the Sweetwater Rim, 1971
Tucker, 1971
Ride the Dark Trail, 1972
Callaghen, 1972
Treasure Mountain, 1972
The Ferguson Rifle, 1973
The Man from Skibbereen, 1973
The Quick and the Dead, 1973
The Californios, 1974
Sackett’s Land, 1974
Rivers West, 1975
The Man from the Broken Hills, 1975
Over on the Dry Side, 1975
The Rider of Lost Creek, 1976
To the Far Blue Mountains, 1976
Where the Long Grass Blows, 1976
Borden Chantry, 1977
Fair Blows the Wind, 1978
The Mountain Valley War, 1978
Bendigo Shafter, 1979
The Proving Trail, 1979
The Iron Marshal, 1979
The Warrior’s Path, 1980
Lonely on the Mountain, 1980
Comstock Lode, 1981
Milo Talon, 1981
The Cherokee Trail, 1982
The Shadow Riders, 1982
The Lonesome Gods, 1983
Ride the River, 1983
Son of a Wanted Man, 1984
The Walking Drum, 1984
Jubal Sackett, 1985
Passin’ Through, 1985
Last of the Breed, 1986
The Haunted Mesa, 1987
Short Fiction:
War Party, 1975
The Strong Shall Live, 1980
Yondering, 1980 (revised edition, 1989)
Buckskin Run, 1981
Bowdrie, 1983
Law the Desert Born, 1983
The Hills of Homicide, 1983
Bowdrie’s Law, 1984
Dutchman’s Flat, 1986
Riding for the Brand, 1986
The Trail to Crazy Man, 1986
The Rider of the Ruby Hills, 1986
Night over the Solomons, 1986
West from Singapore, 1987
Lonigan, 1988
Long Ride Home, 1989
The Outlaws of Mesquite, 1990
Valley of the Sun: Frontier Stories, 1995
West of Dodge: Frontier Stories, 1996
End of the Drive, 1997
Beyond the Great Snow Mountains, 1999
Off the Mangrove Coast, 2000
May There Be a Road, 2001
With These Hands, 2002
Poetry:
Smoke from This Altar, 1939
Nonfiction:
Frontier, 1984 (with photographs by David Muench)
The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels, 1988
A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, 1988
Education of a Wandering Man, 1989.
Louis L’Amour (lah-MOHR), a best-selling American author of Western and frontier fiction, was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore. His father was a veterinarian, chief of police, and farm-machinery salesman. His mother wanted to be a teacher and poet but became a devoted mother of seven. Louis was the youngest.
Although he relished reading, LaMoore quit school in 1923. He became a cattle skinner in Texas, a farmer in New Mexico, a circus hand and performer, boxer, and sailor. In 1935, he sold a story to True Gang Life and in 1939 published (the possibly self-financed) Smoke from This Altar, a collection of his poetry. He served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1946, part of the time in France and Germany in transportation and the tank-destroyer corps.
Early in 1946, LaMoore settled in Los Angeles. He wrote detective, action, and Western fiction as Jim Mayo for pulp magazines, and contracted to write–as Tex Burns–four Hopalong Cassidy novels in the restrictive style of Clarence Mulford, Hopalong’s deceased creator. In 1950, LaMoore, now calling himself Louis L’Amour, published Westward the Tide, his first Western novel. In 1952, Collier’s published his story “The Gift of Cochise.” From it, James Edward Grant created the screenplay for the 1953 film Hondo, starring John Wayne. L’Amour novelized the scenario into Hondo, published by Fawcett in 1953. It was a smashing success. L’Amour’s career was launched.
In the next four years, L’Amour published nine routine Westerns, two as Jim Mayo and all with accurate historical data as background but without necessary revisionary and editorial care. Still, they were popular successes. In 1956, L’Amour married Katherine Elizabeth Adams, a television actress twenty-six years his junior. Abandoning her career, Kathy became the mother of Beau Dearborn and Angelique Gabrielle.
In 1957, L’Amour published Sitka, a superb romantic historical novel about diplomatic, political, and commercial intrigues while the United States was obtaining Alaska from Russia. Having contracted to furnish Bantam Books two to three novels a year, L’Amour continued writing furiously, typing every morning before lunching with friends. Radigan was his first Western with Bantam, followed by two more which were equally unpromising. Then came The Daybreakers, the first of seventeen Sackett family novels.
L’Amour’s Sackett saga was his most ambitious project. Sackett’s Land follows the Hackett family from England in 1599 to the Carolinas. L’Amour planned more novels casting Sacketts from the American Revolution era into and past the Civil War. The family ultimately included more than fifty named characters, representing five succeeding generations, and spread from Tennessee to the Southwest, Mexico, and Canada.
Not content with one multivolume family saga, L’Amour also wrote about two other families. The first of five novels about Chantrys (generally scholars of Irish extraction) is North to the Rails. The earliest chronologically is Fair Blows the Wind, a swashbuckler story beginning in sixteenth century Ireland. The best of three novels about Talons (primarily builders) is Rivers West, concerning a Canadian-born carpenter’s adventures shortly after the Louisiana Purchase.
In 1974, at age sixty-six, L’Amour boldly announced plans for forty-plus novels interlocking Sacketts, Chantrys, and Talons as they pushed the frontier west. By then he had published only fourteen titles in his three-family mega-saga. He continued to write nonsaga novels and, with The Riders of Lost Creek, reintroduced cowboy Lance Kilkenny, first seen in Kilkenny and last seen in The Mountain Valley War. Moreover, Bendigo Shafter, a well-shaped blockbuster Western destined for classic status, dramatizes town-building Wyoming pioneers unconnected to previously mentioned families. With Comstock Lode, L’Amour continued his temporary escape from formulary and family fiction alike; here he brilliantly combines mining-field and San Francisco local-color touches with his hero’s vengeance quest. In The Lonesome Gods, L’Amour poignantly thickens complicated plotting with assorted American Indian myths and legends, including an evil Spaniard, a gigantic human, a wild stallion, a ghost, eerie footprints, and soaring eagles.
L’Amour’s most ambitious departures from the formulary are The Walking Drum, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. The Walking Drum, which L’Amour did not live to make part of an intended trilogy, recounts a twelfth century superhero’s adventures across Europe, mainly in Moorish Spain, Russia, Constantinople, and the Seljuk Empire. Last of the Breed details a Sioux-Cheyenne U.S. Air Force pilot’s escape from villainous Cold War Soviet captors and his survival skills through Siberia to the Bering Strait. The Haunted Mesa, a spotty fantasy but another best-seller, concentrates on American Indian supernaturalism, with ancient Cliff Dwellers in what is now the Southwest’s Four Corners (where L’Amour developed two of his four lavish residences).
By 1975, Bantam reported more than forty million L’Amour books in print, a total exceeding those of John Steinbeck, previously its most fruitful money tree. In 1980, L’Amour celebrated one hundred million books in print. Figures soon more than doubled that total. In many years, avid readers were buying more than fifteen thousand L’Amour books every day. At least twenty-four L’Amour plots have been converted into film and television adaptations, the best being Hondo, Shalako (1968, starring Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot), and The Sacketts (a 1979 television miniseries). In 1983, L’Amour heard that Carroll & Graf, fledgling publishers, were about to issue Law of the Desert Born and The Hills of Homicide, containing stories L’Amour had carelessly neglected to recopyright. He sued and settled out of court. Carroll & Graf not only published both collections but also, in 1986, Riding for the Brand and, as Man Riding West, the contents of Dutchman’s Flat.
In addition to several accolades by his peers, L’Amour was awarded by Congress a National Gold Medal (1982) and a Medal of Freedom (1984). Dozens of audiotape adaptations of L’Amour writings contributed to his multimillionaire status and, after his death from lung cancer in 1988, continued to enrich his wife, editor son, and actress daughter, who, together with his publisher, keep his novels in print and please the public with new assemblies of his half-forgotten short yarns. Despite the mediocrity of this early fiction, Louis L’Amour remains what he always defined himself as being–a natural-born teller of a thousand captivating stories.