Failure™ Magazine

Gold Rush

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

Written by Julia M. Klein   Filed under Arts & Entertainment

The starting point of any such analysis must be L’Amour’s skill as a storyteller, a master of page-turning excitement. His male protagonists typically confront and conquer multiple dangers—harsh nature, deceitful rivals and vengeful Indians—and “win” land to cultivate and a good, strong woman to assist.

“Louis really, really admired strong women,” says Kathy, who managed her husband’s business affairs so he would be free to devote all his energies to writing. “I was housekeeper, secretary, business manager, and drove Louis everywhere…. I was so madly in love, it was nothing. To me, he was the most interesting man I ever met.”

L’Amour rarely outlined his books in advance. “He wrote with a tremendous amount of energy, without doing too much plotting ahead,” says Beau L’Amour, vice president of Louis L’Amour Enterprises, who is researching a biography of his father. (There’s also a L’Amour daughter, Angelique.) “His sense of excitement and discovery in the story is very similar to [that of] you the reader.”

Raised in Jamestown, North Dakota, L’Amour left school at age 15, halfway through the 10th grade, and was largely self-educated. He traveled the world, working as a miner, cattle-skinner, merchant seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, and boxer, while writing both poetry and adventure stories. In his memoir, he says: “My life may not be great to others, but to me it has been one of steady progression, never dull, often exciting, often hungry, tired, and lonely, but always learning. Somewhere back down the years I decided, or my nature decided for me, I would be a teller of stories.”

“Most writers who were successful in pulp days did not come from university writing courses,” says Applebaum. “They sat down at a typewriter and pecked away. They did not get paid if it wasn’t a compelling story.”

Beau places his father in the tradition of Alexander Dumas, Stephen Vincent Benet and Jack London. Though his unadorned prose style has been compared to Hemingway, “personally I think he’s a far simpler, sparer writer than Hemingway,” Beau says. He notes that his father was somehow able, like J.K. Rowling, to address different age groups. “He was writing for adults but without anything too challenging for kids,” he says.

L’Amour’s books “speak to a certain notion of what it means to be an American, and that’s exactly the role the West played after the [Civil] War,” says Deverell, who is writing a book on the subject. While fights over slavery in the Western territories helped precipitate the war, ironically enough, the combatants looked to the West afterwards “to heal the nation.” They defined national identity in terms of a feeling about individualism and ruggedness and the frontier and subduing nature. “L’Amour figured it out,” says Deverell, though it was Owen Wister’s 1902 classic, “The Virginian,” that originated the Western genre.

Michael T. Marsden, an administrator at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, and a L’Amour scholar, is a particular enthusiast of his Sackett series, the fictional saga of three clans that settled the West. He cites L’Amour’s “beautiful blending of realism and romance,” a phrase that seems to come as close as any to capturing the essence of L’Amour’s appeal. While his historical and natural settings were carefully researched and authentic-seeming, his plots inevitably followed a romantic arc, as good triumphed over evil, and hero and heroine fell, chastely, in love. L’Amour’s stories, says Marsden, are “not so much about the West as it was, but about the West as it should have been.”

L’Amour’s own life and friendships supplied the template for much of his work. By all accounts he was a handsome, charismatic, engaging figure—a man who dressed Western, who’d endured a picaresque, hard-knocks youth, and who offered his much-younger wife the sort of marriage that his heroines always craved. “We had the great, great romance,” says Kathy, who married her husband in 1956, when she was 22 and he was 48. “You can’t ask for more than that in life.”

Kathy says that her husband drew on tales of the frontier he heard from the last surviving pioneers. “He knew five people who knew Billy the Kid,” she says. “He was taught to shoot by frontier marshals. He knew the working man’s life.” In later years, he fulfilled a dream by purchasing a ranch in Durango, Colorado, close to the site of many of his tales.

Beau says that his father was, in many ways, mysterious—a frustrated poet who invented parts of his own past and took a long time to mature. In his youth, “he was extremely self-involved and focused on turning himself into a writer and into a celebrity.” From a shy child he became a gregarious adult, and eventually developed “an extremely high opinion of his social skills,” an opinion that others didn’t necessarily share. But, eventually, L’Amour did become the man he sought to be. Beau says: “By the time I came along, he was one of the most refined, interesting, generous people [around].”

Many interviewers and friends who came to know L’Amour over the years second this assessment. He was “always optimistic. He always believed that next great adventure was over that next hill,” Applebaum says. “I enjoyed being in his company.” So, it seems, do his legions of readers.

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