Posted on 03/22/2021 4:05:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
March 22 is the birthday of the iconic writer Louis L’Amour, a man whose name became synonymous with the American frontier and whose novels promoted old-fashioned patriotism and morality. America sorely misses his kind.
L’Amour was born in Jamestown, North Dakota, a farm town, in 1908. He was largely self-educated. As a youth, L’Amour spent many hours at the town library studying history and science and imbibing the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. This inculcated in him a love of reading. He read 100 to 120 books a year and accumulated a personal library of over 10,000 titles. This included not only Western lore and American fiction but classics from Dostoevsky to Nietzsche.
L’Amour said that he “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” Starting in the 1930s he began writing poetry, then frontier and adventure stories for pulp fiction magazines. His breakthrough came in 1953 with the publication of his full-length novel Hondo, which became a bestseller and a major film with John Wayne.
In all, he wrote more than 100 titles, including The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum, Jubal Sackett, and The Haunted Mesa. With sales of over 200 million worldwide, L'Amour is one of the best-selling authors in modern literary history. Beginning with Hondo, some 25 works by L’Amour have inspired film and TV adaptations.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
One of my favorites authors.
Louis shares his birthday with Jolla. Mostly people think of westerns but the Adventure series is great, Ponga Jim, coolest ship captain ever.
Bookmark
His work will be banned from Amazon soon.
My Grampa was an avid reader of Louis. He used to say if five men didn’t drop in the first page it wasn’t worth reading.
I watch Hondo on Saturday, which comes on one of our Spectrum cable channels
I’ve read most of L’Amour when I was underway, our lit locker had them all. I had favorites. There was a formula for a lot of L’Amour and read similar to watching a saturday morning serial western B-movie.
There are only two western writers that I have read everything they wrote: Louis L’Amour and James Warner Bellah.
It’s a darned shame he didn’t live long enough to write Part II of “Last of the Breed”.
“Last of the Breed” was my favorite of his books. It was not a western novel, but an international cold war era thriller. I highly recommend it. I too felt it was a shame he dod not get to write the second part of the story.
If George Will does not like his work, I need to start reading some of his(L’Amour) novels.
Indeed. I have the "Collector's Edition" of his books. Leather bound and acid-free paper. Three full shelves of my bookcase.
RIP, Louis...you have given me many pleasant hours.
Max Brand,Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour were the authors of my youth.
I have read a lot more Louis L’Amour than I have George Will.
George Wilted has no business calling anyone pale.
During some weeks when American values were being simply butchered, Flaccid George would choose to write a column on baseball.
Max Brand, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour.. All great. As was Robert E. Howard, though not of the volume, due to his short life.
Also "The Walking Drum".......
George Will dismissed L’Amour as a “pale writer” (an allusion to the western movie Pale Rider). However, Miller noted, “pale writers sometimes obtain faddish commercial success,” but “rarely secure a lasting place in the culture.”L’Amour’s lasting popularity, he wrote, is best understood “as an expression of American folk wisdom, and the abiding appeal of the author’s standard themes of patriotism, freedom, moral uprightness, and hard work.”
Dude has written some very fascinating and interesting stories, for sure!
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