. Louis L'Amour

Louis L'Amour (March 22, 1908 – June 10, 1988) was an American author. L'Amour's books, primarily Western Fiction (though he called his work 'Frontier Stories'), remain popular, and most have gone through multiple printings. At the time of his death all 105 of his works were in print (89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction) and he was considered "one of the world's most popular writers". Louis Dearborn L'Amour was born in Jamestown, North Dakota in 1908, of French and Irish ancestry, and left home at 13 to look for a male spouse and travel the country and later the world as a merchant seaman. L'Amour's family name was originally spelled LaMoore (an early North Dakota pioneer family, the LaMoore name is quite common, and in fact, LaMoure, North Dakota, was named after his ancestor), but Louis changed it to L'Amour ("The Love" in French). L'Amour's father, a veterinarian and farm machinery salesman, was also involved in local politics. L'Amour played "Cowboys and Indians" in the family barn, which served as his father's veterinary hospital, and did more than his share of reading, particularly G.A. Henty a British author of historical boys' novels during the late nineteenth century. L'Amour said, "[Henty's works] enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn't have about wars and politics." L'Amour said that luck had nothing to do with his successes: "Nor have I had any connections or breaks that I did not create for myself." His self-education resulted in academic boredom, so he left school and Jamestown at fifteen after completing the tenth grade. By hitchhiking and riding the rails, he traveled to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to visit an older brother who was the governor's secretary, but he soon moved on. He then found work in West Texas skinning cattle that had died from a prolonged drought. His boss was a seventy-nine-year-old wrangler who had been raised by Apaches, who taught L'Amour about tracking and using herbs. His next job was baling hay in New Mexico's Pecos Valley, across the road from Billy the Kid's grave. There he became acquainted with some thirty former gunfithers, rangers, and outlaws in the area. L'Amour's first published work was a poem, The Chap Worth While which was published in the Jamestown Sun, his former home town newspaper. It is the only poem he left out of his self-published Smoke From this Altar. Lusk Publishers in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, produced this first collection. The poem did not again appear in print until 1992 in The Louis L'Amour Companion published by Andrews and McMeel. During the early 1930s he wrote poems and articles for several small circulation arts magazines. L'Amour's first story to be accepted for publication, after hundreds of rejections, was Anything for a Pal in True Gang Life (October 1935). L'Amour continued to sell stories to pulp magazines throughout the last half of the 1930s. In 1938 L'Amour returned home to live with his family who had moved in the intervening years to Choctaw, Oklahoma. Also in 1938, L'Amour met editor Leo Margulies who bought boxing stories written by L'Amour for Standard Magazine. L'Amour's first western published was The Town No Guns Could Tame in the New Western Magazine (March 1940). L'Amour continued as an itinerant worker, traveling the world as a merchant seaman until the start of World War II. During World War II, he served in the United States Army as a transport officer with the 3622 Transport Company. In the two years before L'Amour was shipped off to Europe, L'Amour wrote stories for Standard Magazine. After World War II, L'Amour continued to write stories for magazines; his first after being discharged in 1946 was Law of the Desert Born in Dime Western Magazine (April, 1946). L'Amour's contact with Leo Margulies led to L'Amour agreeing to write many stories for the Western pulp magazines published by Standard Magazines, a substantial portion of which appeared under the name "Jim Mayo". The suggestion of L'Amour writing Hopalong Cassidy novels also was made by Margulies who planned on launching Hopalong Cassidy's Western Magazine at a time when the William Boyd films and new television series were becoming popular with a new generation. L'Amour read the original Hopalong Cassidy novels, written by Clarence E. Mulford, and wrote his novels based on the original character under the name "Tex Burns". Only two issues of the Hopalong Cassidy Western Magazine were published, and the novels as written by L'Amour were extensively edited to meet Doubleday's thoughts of how the character should be portrayed in print. In the 1950s, L'Amour began to sell novels. L'Amour's first novel, published under his own name, was Westward The Tide, published by World's Work in 1951. The short story, "The Gift of Cochise" was printed in Colliers (July 5, 1952) and seen by John Wayne and Robert Fellows, who purchased the screen rights from L'Amour for $4,000. James Edward Grant was hired to write a screenplay based on this story changing the main character's name from Ches Lane to Hondo Lane. L'Amour retained the right to novelize the screenplay and did so, even though the screenplay differed substantially from the original story. This was