Louis L'Amour
The twentieth century saw a remarkable expansion of popular American fiction, with the Western genre emerging as one of its most durable forms. Louis L'Amour, born on March 22, 1908, in Jamestown, was among the American writers who made that genre a sustained literary enterprise, working across novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry, and nonfiction before his death on June 10, 1988, in Los Angeles.
Writing in English, L'Amour produced work across a notably wide range of forms. He wrote Western fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and short-story collections, and also contributed to film and television as a screenwriter. This range placed him outside the constraints of any single category, even as the Western remained the dominant strand of his output. Many of his stories were adapted into films, extending his work from the page into other media during his lifetime.
The scale of L'Amour's output was considerable. At the time of his death, he had 105 existing works, comprising 89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction. Notably, almost all of these works remained in print at the time of his death — a measure of the sustained readership his writing held over the decades. That breadth of active circulation, across so many individual titles and across multiple genres, distinguished the body of work he left behind.
The recognition L'Amour received during his career reflected both popular and institutional acknowledgment of his contributions to American letters. He received the Owen Wister Award, which honors distinguished contributions to Western literature. Beyond the literary world specifically, he was awarded the National Book Award, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the latter two representing the highest civilian honors the United States Congress and executive branch respectively confer. The Congressional Gold Medal, in particular, placed him among a select group of individuals recognized by an act of Congress for their contributions to American culture and history. It is on this record of formal recognition, accumulated across his career, that L'Amour's place in the broader story of American popular fiction rests.
Quotes by Louis L'Amour
Louis L'Amour's insights on:
Revenge could steal a man's life until there was nothing left by emptiness...A man can lose sight of everything else when he's bent on revenge, and it ain't worth it
How long is a girl a child? She is a child, and then one morning you wake up and she's a woman and a dozen different people of whom you recognize none.
A man you can figure on; a woman you can't. They're likely either to faint or to grab for a gun regardless of consequences.
You've got to admit she's pretty much of a woman, and she as always the lady. But you've got to admit she keeps what she's got so you know it's there.
We had met as equals, rarely a good thing in such matters, for the woman who wishes to be the equal of a man usually turns out to be less than a man and less than a woman. A woman is herself, which is something altogether different than a man.
Them Injuns. Takin the country off em. In good times it must've been a fine life they had, huntin and fishin or driftin down the country on the trail of the buffalo. I ain't sure what we'll do to the country will be any better.
We had come a far piece into a strange land, a trail lit by lonely campfires and gunfire and the wishing we did by day and by night. Now we rode back to plant roots to the land and with luck, to leave sons to carry on a more peaceful life, in what we hoped would be a more peaceful world.
I would not sit waiting for some value tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime. ... I would make something happen.