Troubadour of the American West: an exemplar of the frontier life he wrote about, author Louis L'Amour celebrated the honorable individualism of the men and women who settled the American West

New American, The, March 21, 2005 by William Norman Grigg

After Louis landed a second right to the midsection, two of his opponent's friends moved in to help. They were intercepted by two local cowpunchers, who quietly advised them to leave well enough alone. Leveling his opponent with a third blow, Louis walked away quickly, "pausing only to thank the two cowboys."

"They were, as it happened, cousins," recalled L'Amour. "Two rawboned, lean-bodied young men, one of them twenty-one, the other a year or two older." They provided Louis with a horse and invited him to join them for supper. "That night before a campfire we discussed the events of the morning, and [one of them] commented, 'We never get into fights.' 'You're lucky,' I agreed. 'It isn't luck,' his cousin suggested, 'it's our family. There s thirteen boys in his family and sixteen in mine. If they tackle any one of us they'll have to whip us all.'"

This incident, L'Amour recalled decades later, inspired his stories about the Sackett family, of whom one character (in Ride the River) would say: "If you step on one Sackett's toes, they all come running."

"Yondering"

From his teens to his early 30s, Louis continued his self-defined studies as an itinerant laborer and scholar. For years he followed the hobo's path, hopping freight trains and hitch-hiking in search of work and sometimes sleeping in grain bins or lumberyards. On reaching the West Coast, he hired out as a merchant seaman, visiting China, Japan, Borneo, and other exotic locales. But he always found time to read. Quite often his belly went unfilled after he had spent his wages to buy books.

"In pursuing my education, I had been reading approximately one hundred books a year," he later recalled. "By that I mean books completed, and it says nothing of books I simply dipped into or simply referred to from time to time." L'Amour's memoir contains a detailed bibliography of the books he read during his "yondering" years of 1930-1935. His interests ranged from Homer to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ancient texts like the Hindu Baghavad Gita are listed alongside contemporary works such as the science fiction of H.G. Wells and compilations of pulpy detective stories. Interestingly, the literary style Louis would come to define--the American western--is poorly represented on his list.

Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising, since the western wasn't the first style at which Louis tried his hand. In the late 1920s and 1930s, L'Amour began to submit poems and short stories to various publications. Poetry, he found, "didn't pay at all" (he collected his poems in a self-published volume entitled Smoke From This Altar, which was reissued posthumously). He enjoyed more success selling stories drawn on his personal experiences. And perhaps because of the fact that his time was at a premium, Louis eventually developed a taut, sinewy writing style, making both characters and settings vivid without leaving the reader mired in self-indulgent authorial detail.

"One is not, by decision, just a writer," L'Amour recalled. "One becomes a writer by writing, by shaping thoughts into the proper or improper words ... and by doing it constantly. There was so much I needed to learn that could only be learned by doing, by sitting down with a typewriter or a pen and simply writing. Most young writers waste at least three paragraphs and often three pages writing about their story rather than telling it. This was one of the many things I had yet to learn [as a young writer]."