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

From Storyteller to Icon

By the mid-1950s, Louis had found a home in Los Angeles, where he continued to churn out novels and screenplays. For the remainder of his life, he followed a set routine: rising at around 5:30 a.m., writing until noon, returning to his typewriter an hour and a half later and working until he'd finished at least 5-10 publishable pages of typescript. He took great pride in both his prolific output and his ability to write without working off a detailed story outline--although at any time he kept preliminary notes for up to a half-dozen future projects. To reward himself for finishing his daily allotment of writing, Louis would retire to his home gymnasium, where he would skip rope, lift weights, and work on the heavy punching bag.

Due in no small measure to his financially deprived youth, Louis was reluctant to start a family until he was financially secure. In 1956, at the age of 48, Louis married an aspiring film actress named Katherine Elizabeth Adams. Their son Beau arrived in 1961, and he was joined by daughter Angelique in 1964. The L'Amour household also became home to Louis's library, which grew to include more than 10,000 books, as well as thousands of journals and periodicals. Eventually, Louis would acquire the largest private collection of primary source documents on the American West. And of course, he infected his children with his contagious love of books and insatiable appetite for learning.

"When I was very young," recalled Angelique, "Dad explained to me that he had a time machine in his office. Through books, he said, I could go anywhere at any time and be anyone at all without leaving the room. That is the magic of reading.... His office is lined wall to wall and floor to ceiling with books--all of them opportunities to learn and experience life through words."

Angelique learned to read "by watching and listening to my father. Starting from the time I could get out of a chair by myself, I would stand behind him and read over his shoulder." As an older child she read many of her father's published books for enjoyment. As a young adult, she came to recognize that her father's stories offered more than well-crafted diversion.

"Later, I finally understood what some of his fan mail had meant," wrote Angelique in A Trail of Memories. "Women who were raising children without husbands had written to him that they were raising their children on the teachings in his books. They'd told their sons that if they grew up to have the morals and values of his characters, they would be good men. Men to be proud of, men to shape the world."

Before his death, L'Amour received several honorary degrees and was appointed to several prominent advisory boards, including the Library of Congress's Center for the Book. He also devoted much of his time and a great deal of money to two worthy projects that never came to fruition: A "Library of Americana," collecting memoirs, diaries, and other historical documents; and "Shalako," a privately financed recreation of a 19th-century western town, what L'Amour called a "Western Williamsburg."