Failure™ Magazine

Gold Rush

For Louis L’Amour, death was a great career move.

Written by Julia M. Klein   Filed under Arts & Entertainment

Publishing success didn’t come early, or easily, to Louis Dearborn L’Amour. “He experienced tremendous rejection—200 stories were rejected before the first one was accepted,” recalls his widow, Kathy L’Amour, speaking by telephone from the Los Angeles home they shared. Before he became known as an astonishingly prolific author of frontier fiction, L’Amour (1908-88) “wrote all kinds of things in order to live: two-line fillers for farm magazines, nursery rhymes,” she says. “We had some really lean times.”

No more. Today, Kathy L’Amour is president of Louis L’Amour Enterprises, which continues to market the L’Amour brand—so skillfully that there are more than 300 million copies of his 123 books in print, all but one published by Bantam Books. One-third of his sales have come since his death, effectively transforming him from a formulaic writer of drugstore westerns to an enduring, and respected, cultural phenomenon.

“One of the many extraordinary things about Louis L’Amour is that now, almost two decades after his death, he remains one of the most popular novelists and short-story writers in the country,” says Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, as well as a longtime L’Amour editor and friend. “He remains, year in, year out, one of the most successful backlist authors for all of Random House.”

Bantam last year marked a milestone: a mutually profitable half-century relationship with its top author. After his death, says publicist Chris Artis, Bantam was able to publish a steady stream of new works, including a memoir, “Education of a Wandering Man” (1989), drawn from a trove of materials unearthed by his son, Beau. At the rate of one a year, Bantam is currently bringing out a series of Legacy Editions, low-priced hardcover versions of books that previously appeared as paperback originals, as well as seven thematically-organized volumes of his collected short stories.

Appearing this month is “The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour - The Adventure Stories, Volume 4.” Legacy Edition novels so far include “Hondo” (originally published in 1953), “High Lonesome” (1962), and “Kiowa Trail” (1964), a tautly plotted tale of romance and revenge on the cattle trail.

In a sense, this is all just the latest stage in L’Amour’s evolution through a series of publishing formats—from pulp magazines to mass market paperback originals to hardcover bestsellers. “He started his career over three times,” notes Kathy, a former actress who appeared in such television westerns as Death Valley Days and Gunsmoke.

Each time, L’Amour—who sold about 30 of his works to the movies—reinvented himself without the help of literary critics, who mostly ignored or disparaged him. “He didn’t read his reviews much,” his widow says. “He didn’t want to fill his head with negativity.” But towards the end of his life, under President Ronald Reagan (a fan), recognition did come in the form of a Congressional Gold Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom, unique honors for a novelist.

And now, attention must—as the saying goes—be paid, as posthumous tributes in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal attest. “His books embody heroic virtues that seem to matter now more than ever,” John J. Miller wrote four years ago in the Journal.

“It is fascinating, his success,” says Bill Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, who admits he was never a L’Amour aficionado. “It doesn’t make sense to dismiss him as a potboiler writer. That’s a profoundly successful cultural enterprise. It makes sense to excavate the nerves he’s touching, where the levels of attraction are.”

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