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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Louis L'Amour
LOUIS LŽAMOUR
Awarded by
President Ronald Reagan
March 26, 1984
Through his western novels, Louis LŽAmour has played a leading role in shaping our national identity. His writings portrayed the rugged individual and the deep-seated values of those who conquered the American frontier. Starting out from humble beginnings, he has lived a fulfilling and adventurous life. An eminently successful writer, more than 100 million copies of his novels are in print. LŽAmour's descriptions of America and Americans have added to our understanding of our past and reaffirmed our potential as an exploring, pioneering, and free people.
Bio
Popular American writer of western fiction. L'Amour was the most significant writer of the genre since the 1950s. His publishing numbers surpassed Frederick Faust (Max Brand), while his popularity rivaled Zane Grey. Hailed on one book cover as the 'World's Greatest Writer', L'Amour sold over 225 million copies, making him the third top-seller in the world (according to Saturday Review) . L'Amour's books have been translated into dozens of languages and made into 30 films. "I am probably the last writer who will ever have known the people who lived the frontier life. In drifting about across the West, I have known five men and two women who knew Billy the Kid, two who rode in the Tonto Basin war in Arizona, and a variety of others who were outlaws, or frontier marshals like Jeff Milton, Bill Tilghman, and Chris Madse, or just pioneers." (from Education of a Wndering Man , 1989)
Louis L'Amour was born in Jamestown, North Dakota, the last of his parents' seven children. The family name was originally LaMoore or Larmour, reflecting the French-Canadian background. His father had many occupations, including a salesman of farm machinery, a veterinarian, a chief police, and a teacher. L'Amour's mother was trained as a teacher, and she was also an amateur poet. The future author grew up hearing stories of pioneers and Native Americans. He began reading earlier than most - from his parent's bookshelf he found collections of Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Emerson. All in the family had library cards. L'Amour's first published poem, 'The Chap Worth While', appeared in Jamestown Sun in 1926.
From the ages of fifteen to nineteen L'Amour worked at a variety of jobs: he tried boxing, worked as a circus hand, a lumberjack, and a seaman, and traveled in the Far East, China, and Africa. In the ring, he won 51 of 59 fights as a professional boxer. He was even an elephant handler for a while. During the 1930s he became a successful boxer and traveled in Asia. After returning to the United States, he moved with his parents on a small farm near Choctaw, Oklahoma. L'Amour took some creative writing courses at the University of Oklahoma, and started his career as a book reviewer. Almost all of his early short stories were rejected. SMOKE FROM THIS ALTAR (1939) was L'Amour's first book, a collection of poems, in which he crystallized his wanderlust in 'Out of the ocean depths': "Out of the distance / that holds me enchanted, / Up from the green, / shifting violence below - / A voice from the twilight, / the bauty, the stillness, / A voice that comes calling / and calling to go. ..." The book was only for sale in Oklahoma bookstores. Although L'Amour's collection was not a commercial success, it received good reviews. "For he has the three things which it takes to make a writer: a love for words, industry, and something to say," wrote the Daily Oklahoma .
During World War II L'Amour served in a tank destroyer unit in France and Germany. In 1946 he settled in Los Angeles and wrote Western stories for pulp magazines - he was nearing 40 and could use his own experiences as material. First story he had sold in 1935. It was a gangster story, 'Anything for a Pal', published in True Gang Life . L'Amour's early tales were not of the West, but of the Far East or of the prize ring. But the West was where he had grown up and it was an easy step for him to write about the frontier. L'Amour's first novel, WESTWARD THE TIDE (1950) appeared in England. It was not published in the United States until Bantam Books acquired the rights many years later. In 1951 appeared L'Amour's first Western, HOPALONG CASSIDY AND THE RIDERS OF HIGH ROCK, under the pen name Tex Burns. Hopalong Cassidy character had been created by Clarence Mulford, but soon L'Amour established his own name as a novelist. In 1956 L'Amour married Katherine Elizabeth Adams, who had acter in such television series as Gunsmoke and Death Valley Days .
L'Amour wrote five pages a day, including Sundays and holidays. In his study, full of books, he had biographical material on 2,000 old gunfighters. After the 1950s, L'Amour published at the top of his career several western novels in a year, of which probably the best known is HONDO (1953), published by Gold Medal books. Originally the story appeared in in 1952 in Collier's magazine under the title The Gift of Cochise . "Best western novel I have ever read," said John Wayne on the cover of the book, but as far as is know he had not read it. However, Wayne bought its rights.
Hondo Lane, a cavalry scout, was a "big man, wide-shouldered, with the lean, hard-boned face of the desert rider. There was no softness in him. His toughness was ingrained and deep, without cruelty, yet quick, hard, and dangerous. Whatever wells of gentleness might lie within him were guarded and deep." After killing the degenerate husband of the woman he loves, he becomes torn between his independence and an emerging desire to settle down. Using repeatedly his popular formula, L'Amour was accused of conventionalism and producing standard novels without much ambition. Following the familiar character development, his heroes are righteous but violent, women proud and beautiful, and villains are killed at the end. SITKA (1957) was a historical novel with a sailor for hero. THE BROKEN GUN (1966), partly autobiographical, was L'Amour's effort to write a novel set in the 20th century. It is possible that the story influenced David Morrell's famous novel First Blood (1972). THE LAST OF THE BREED (1986) opened a new direction for narrative: the protagonist, Major Joe Makatozi, was a part-Indian pilot who was shot down over Siberia. In order to escape the KGB and live off the frozen tundra, somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Baikal, he must rely on his Indian skills. THE WALKING DRUM (1984) was an adventure story set in the 12th century Europe. THE HAUNTED MESA (1987), L'Amour's last novel, took the reader into another reality.
FRONTIER (1984) was L'Amour's first work of nonfiction. "Our debt to the frontier us great," he wrote. "George Washington as soldier and surveyor and land hunter spent many of his early years on the frontier and in wild country. Thomas Jefferson grew up in a house that was one of the first at which the Long Hunters stopped when they returned to civilization. He must have absorbed many ideas from these visitors, who brought with them not only the romance of the wilderness but their confident independence born from having met the enemy and survived."
Although L'Amour's early works were written to entertain the reader, they also offer facts about history and life in the old West. "When I write about a spring, that spring is there," L'Amour said, "and the water is good to drink." Historical details are carefully studied but they do not burden the narrative pace. "Usually I am characterized as a western writer," he once said. " I do not mind the term, but it is not strictly correct. To me, and to many others, I am a writer of the frontier, not only in the West but elsewhere." (from The Education of a Wandering Man ) During his later phase, from the 1970s, he began to write a series of books about three families - the Sacketts, Talons and Chantrys. The Sackett series started in 1960 with the novel THE DAYBREAKERS, and continued in some eighteen books, following history from Elizabethan England, when the first Sackett sailed from Wales, to the Far West of the 1870s.
In the 1981 L'Amour was one of the five bestselling authors still working, in company with Harold Robbins, Barbara Cartland, Irving Wallace, and Janet Dailey. He reached a wider audience for western stories than any of the other great names: Zane Grey, Max Brand, or Ernest Haycox. L'Amour was the first novelist awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, and in 1984 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Film adaptations from L'Amour's work has been mostly fast-moving routine productions or pleasant-looking westerns with tolerable production values, which have attracted such stars as John Wayne (Hondo ), Sophia Loren (Heller in Pink Tights ), Alan Ladd (The Guns of the Timberland ), Natalie Wood (The Burning Hills ), and Sean Connery (Shalako ), starring also Brigitte Bardot. "We learned about Louis L'Amour in high school civics classes, in the unit on Our State where we were taught to have pride in North Dakota. It wasn't always easy. On television Johnny Carson publicly doubted our existence. We were designated an expendable, low-population-density ''sponge area'' for incoming Soviet missiles. We were labeled clodhoppers, dirt farmers, the butt of Montanans' jokes. Yet we had our symbols: the meadowlark, the flickertail squirrel, the prairie rose, and we had our heroes, whose biographies composed a reassuringly thick volume entitled ''Extraordinary North Dakotans.'' We had Sitting Bull, Lawrence Welk, Eric Sevareid and the Wyndmere patriarch whose beard grew to a length of 17 feet and is now displayed in the Smithsonian. And of course, we had Louis." (Louise Erdich inThe New York Times , June 2, 1985)
At the time of his death it was estimated that L'Amour had published 101 novels, short story collections, poetry and non-fiction. Louis L'Amour died of cancer on June 10, 1988. He left behind many uncollected stories and some unpublished manuscripts, which his heirs have gradually brought into print. In spite of his reputation of the ultimate western story writer, L'Amour's started his career as a poet, who asked in 1940 in Script Magazine : "Can violence, even for fun, be right?"
L'Amour was an avid reader and in EDUCATION OF A WANDERING MAN (1989) he gives a colorful picture of his adventurous early years which were also years of reading. "Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him." L'Amour's reading list included such classics as Byron's Don Juan , Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson , Robert Louis Stevenson'sTreasure Island - in 1930 he read 115 books and plays, among them Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra , Sax Rohmer's The Daughter of Fu Manchu , and Eugene O'Neill's The Long Voyage Home .
L'Amour wrote 113 books, 260 million copies of which have been sold worldwide in dozens of languages, and thirty of which have been turned into movies. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, reveals an even more prodigious love of life and reading.
Louis Dearborn L'Amour
March 22, 1908 (Jamestown, North Dakota) - June 10, 1988 (Los Angeles, California)
Western Writers of America Spur Award 1969
American Book Award 1978
1983 Congressional Gold Medal
1984 Presidential Medal of Freedom
Novels
L'Amour, Louis,
--Westward the Tide, World's Work, Surrey, England, 1950.
--Hondo, Gold Medal, New York, 1953. (aka The Gift of Cochise ) Cinema: Hondo, 1953.
--Showdown at Yellow Butte, Ace Books, New York, 1954. (as by Jim Mayo)
--Utah Blaine, 1954. (as by Jim Mayo)
--Crossfire Trail, Ace Books, New York, 1954.
--Kilkenny, Ace Books, New York, 1954.
--Heller with a Gun, Gold Medal, New York, 1954.
--To Tame a Land, Fawcett, New York, 1955.
--Guns of the Timberlands, Jason, New York, 1955.
--The Burning Hills, Jason, New York, 1956.
--Silver Canyon, Avalon, New York, 1956. (aka Riders of the Dawn )
--Last Stand at Papago Wells, Gold Medal, New York, 1957.
--The Tall Stranger, Fawcett, New York, 1957.
--Sitka, Appleton, New York, 1957.
--Radigan, Bantam, New York, 1958.
--The First Fast Draw, Bantam, New York, 1959.
--Taggart, Bantam, New York, 1959.
--Flint, Bantam, New York, 1960.
--The Day Breakers, Bantam, New York, 1960. The Sackett Family
--Sackett, Bantam, New York, 1961. The Sackett Family
--Shalako, Bantam, New York, 1962.
--Killoe, Bantam, New York, 1962.
--High Lonesome, Bantam, New York, 1962.
--Lando, Bantam, New York, 1962. ISBN: 0-553-27676-X The Sackett Family
--How the West Was Won, Bantam, New York, 1963. (based on screenplay by James R. Webb)
--Fallon, Bantam, New York, 1963.
--Fallon, G. K. Hall & Company, Boston, Massachusetts, 1963. ISBN: 0-8161-3359-X
--Catlow, Bantam, New York, 1963.
--Dark Canyon, Bantam, New York, 1963.
--Hanging Woman Creek, Bantam, New York, 1964. ISBN: 0-553-24762-X
--Kiowa Trail, Bantam, New York, 1965.
--The High Graders, Bantam, New York, 1965.
--The Key-Lock Man, Bantam, New York, 1965.
--Kid Rodelo, Bantam, New York, 1966.
--Kilrone, Bantam, New York, 1966.
--The Broken Gun, Bantam, New York, 1966.
--Matagordo, Bantam, New York, 1967.
--Down the Long Hills, Bantam, New York, 1968. Spur
--Chancy, Bantam, New York, 1968.
--Conagher, Bantam, New York, 1969.
--The Empty Land, Bantam, New York, 1969.
--The Man Called Noon, Bantam, New York, 1970.
--Reilly's Luck, Bantam, New York, 1970.
--Brionne, Bantam, New York, 1971.
--Under the Sweetwater Rim, Bantam, New York, 1971.
--Tucker, Bantam, New York, 1971.
--North to the Rails, Bantam, New York, 1971. The Chantrys
--Callaghen, Bantam, New York, 1972.
--The Quick and the Dead, Bantam, New York, 1973.
--The Man from Skibbereen, G. K. Hall & Company, Boston, Massachusetts, 1973.
--The Ferguson Rifle, Bantam, New York, 1973. The Chantrys
--The Californios, Saturday Review Press, 1974.
--Rivers West, Saturday Review Press, 1974. The Talons
--The Man from the Broken Hills, Bantam, New York, 1975. The Talons
--Over on the Dry Side, Saturday Review Press, New York, 1975. The Chantrys
--The Rider of Lost Creek, Bantam, New York, 1976.
--Where the Long Grass Blows, Bantam, New York, 1976.
--Borden Chantry, Bantam, New York, 1977. The Chantrys
--Where the Long Grass Blows, Bantam, New York, 1978.
--The Mountain Valley War, Bantam, New York, 1978.
--Bendigo Shafter, Dutton, New York, 1978. American Book Award
--Fair Blows the Wind, Bantam, New York, 1978. The Chantrys
--The Iron Marshall, Bantam, New York, 1979.
--The Proving Trail, Bantam, New York, 1979.
--Lonely on the Mountain, Bantam, New York, 1980.
--Comstock Load, Bantam, New York, 1981.
--Milo Talon, Bantam, New York, 1981. The Talons
--The Cherokee Trail, Bantam, New York, 1982.
--The Shadow Riders, Bantam, New York, 1982.
--The Lonesome Gods, Bantam, New York, 1983.
--Son of a Wanted Man, Bantam, New York, 1984. ISBN: 0-553-24457-4
--The Walking Drum, Bantam, New York, 1984.
--Passin' Through, Bantam, New York, 1985.
--Jubal Sackett, Bantam, New York, 1985. The Sackett Family
--Last of the Breed, Bantam, New York, 1986.
--West of the Pilot Range, Bantam, New York, 1986.
--A Trail to the West, Bantam, New York, 1986.
--The Haunted Mesa, Bantam, New York, 1987. ISBN: 0-553-05182-2
Hopalong Cassidy Series:
--The Riders of High Rock, Doubleday, New York, 1951. (as by Tex Burns)
--The Rustlers of West Fork, Doubleday, New York, 1951. (as by Tex Burns)
--The Trail to Seven Pines, Doubleday, New York, 1951. (as by Tex Burns)
--Trouble Shooter, Doubleday, New York, 1952. (as by Tex Burns) ISBN: 0-553-08912-9 Collections of Short Fiction
L'Amour, Louis,
--War Party, Bantam, New York, 1975.
--Yondering, Bantam, New York, 1980.
--The Strong Shall Live, Bantam, New York, 1980.
--Buckskin Run, Bantam, New York, 1981.
--Law of the Desert Born, Bantam, New York, 1983.
--Bowdrie, Bantam, New York, 1983.
--The Hills of Homicide, Bantam, New York, 1984.
--Bowdrie's Law, Bantam, New York, 1984.
--Riding for the Brand, Bantam, New York, 1986.
--Dutchman's Flat, Bantam, New York, 1986.
--The Trail to Crazy Man, Bantam, New York, 1986.
--The Rider of the Ruby Hills, Bantam, New York, 1986.
--Night over the Solomons, Bantam, New York, 1986.
--West From Singapore, Bantam Books, New York, 1987. ISBN: 0-553-26353-6
--Lonigan, Bantam, New York, 1987.
--Long Ride Home, Bantam, New York, 1989.
--The Outlaws of Mesquite, Bantam, New York, 1991.
--Valley of the Sun: Frontier Stories, Bantam, New York, 1995.
--West of Dodge: Frontier Stories, Bantam, New York, 1996.
--End of the Drive, Bantam, New York, 1997.
--Monument Rock, Bantam, New York, 1998. ISBN: 0-553-10833-6
--Beyond the Graet Snow Mountains, Bantam, New York, 1999. ISBN: 0-553-58041-8
--Off the Mangrove Coast, Bantam, New York, 2000. ISBN: 0-553-80160-0
--May there Be A Road, Bantam, New York, 2001. ISBN: 0-553-80213-5
--With These Hands, Bantam, New York, 2002. ISBN: 0-553-80273-9 Sources of Biographical and Bibliographical Information
L'Amour, Louis, Education of a Wandering Man, 1989.
L'Amour, Beau, Afterword, in Off the Mangrove Coast, Bantam Books, New York, 2000.
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Medal History
