Louis L’Amour (1908–1988) was born in Jamestown, North Dakota and is known as a prolific writer of western novels.
He never completed high school but traveled to Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico taking low paying jobs but exposing him to western lore. He served in the Army during World War II and started writing regularly for magazines. L’Amour’s first western published was The Town No Guns Could Tame in the New Western Magazine (1940).
In the 1950s, L’Amour began to sell novels on a regular basis and soon Hollywood discovered his novels and began making them into films. From Wikipedia: “This was published as Hondo in 1953 and released on the same day the film opened with a blurb from John Wayne stating that “Hondo was the finest Western Wayne had ever read”. During the remainder of the decade L’Amour produced a great number of novels, both under his own name as well as others (e. g. Jim Mayo). Also during this time he rewrote and expanded many of his earlier short story and pulp fiction stories to book length for various publishers.”
In 1956 Louis L’Amour married Katherine Elizabeth Adams, an aspiring actress. The daughter of a resort developer and silent movie star, Kathy had grown up in the deserts and mountains of Southern California. Together they traveled all over the west searching out locations and doing research for Louis’ books.
More from Wikipedia” “Bantam Publishers was primarily responsible for L’Amour’s success. They required independent distributors to buy titles in lots of 10,000 copies if they wanted access to other Bantam titles at wholesale prices, and they kept all of L’Amour’s books in print at all times. Eventually this strategy forced retailers to push other authors off the racks in the Western sections of their bookstores.”
L’Amour eventually wrote more than one hundred novels, selling more than 225 million copies that were translated into dozens of languages. In the years since his death in 1988 over one hundred million copies of his books have been sold.
I believe his wife Kathy is still alive but don’t know where she is living.
His official website is louislamour.com.
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