Podcast #1,025: The Life and Legacy of Louis L’Amour

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

With over 300 million books sold, Louis L’Amour is one of the bestselling authors of all time. All 120 of his books remain in print. But the greatest story L’Amour ever penned was his own. He spent the early part of his life traveling in a circus, working as a lumberjack and miner, circling the world as a seaman, winning over 50 fights as a professional boxer, and serving in WWII.

Today on the show, I talk about both the personal and professional aspects of Louis’ life with his son, Beau L’Amour. We discuss some of Louis’ adventures and the autodidactic education he gave himself by way of a voracious reading habit. We then turn to how Louis got started as a writer and how he cut his teeth writing for pulp magazines before breaking through as a Western novelist and becoming a blockbuster success in his sixties.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Louis L’Amour works mentioned in the show:
  • Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir
  • Hondo
  • Yondering
  • No Traveller Returns
  • The Walking Drum
  • Last of the Breed
  • Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures, Volume 1 and Volume 2
• “Holding Her Down” by Jack London
• AoM Article: How and Why to Become a Lifelong Learner
• AoM Article: The Libraries of Famous Men — Louis L’Amour

Connect With Beau L’Amour

• The Louis L’Amour website
• Beau’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. With over 300 million books sold, Louis L’Amour is one of the best-selling authors of all time. All 120 of his books remain in print, but the greatest story L’Amour ever penned was his own. He spent the early part of his life traveling in a circus, working as a lumberjack and miner, circling the world as a seaman, winning over 50 fights as a professional boxer and serving in World War II. Today on the show, I talk about both the personal and professional aspects of Louis’ life with his son, Beau L’Amour. We discuss some of Louis’ adventures and the autodidactic education he gave himself by way of a voracious reading habit. We then turn to how Louis got started as a writer, and how he cut his teeth writing for Pulp magazines before breaking through as a Western novelist and becoming a blockbuster success in the ’60s.

After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/l’amour.

Alright, Beau L’Amour, welcome to the show.

Beau L’Amour: Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: So you are the son of the famous Western author, Louis L’Amour and we’re gonna find out he was more than just a Western author today in this conversation. I know a lot of our listeners are familiar with your dad and his prodigious work, but for those who aren’t familiar with Louis L’Amour can you give us a thumbnail sketch of his career? What was he famous for and how many books did he publish?

Beau L’Amour: Sure. Dad was one of the bestselling authors of the 20th century. He’s wrote maybe 200, 250 short stories, novels, over till today, we’ve sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 330 million copies.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Beau L’Amour: We’ve never had a title go out of print, that’s actually even more impressive.

Brett McKay: That is.

Beau L’Amour: And dad’s still in probably the top 50 authors in the world when it comes to yearly sales.

Brett McKay: That’s impressive. And he was mostly famous for his Westerns.

Beau L’Amour: That is correct. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then I think some people might… Some of his work, his stories and novels, they got turned into TV shows and movies, correct?

Beau L’Amour: About 40 of them, if you include all the TV adaptations. Dad, he did a lot of business in early television in the 1950s and ’60s, so he sold a lot of stories as episodes to Tales of Wells Fargo and a really, really, really early TV series called Cowboy G-Men, if you can believe that, was really one of the first television series that was ever produced.

Brett McKay: And one Western that people probably seen, it’s a John Wayne one, Hondo.

Beau L’Amour: Yes.

Brett McKay: That was based off of a short story by your dad, correct?

Beau L’Amour: That was, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When did you realize growing up that your dad was a famous bestselling author?

Beau L’Amour: He wasn’t really famous when I was a kid, so dad really started to hit in the mid 1970s, like the big bestseller kind of things, autograph lines around the block and that kind of thing. And so when I was a child, when I was a very young teenager he was still kind of struggling. And we were… We always lived comfortably, but he had to write three or four books a year to let us do that. And by the mid 1970s, the number of backlist titles, the number of titles that were still in print and still in distribution kind of reached critical mass. And every time he had a new book come out, it boosted sales on everything in his backlist. And so there was… Since the backlist was just bigger and bigger and bigger and nothing was going out of print, the money turned up, the sales turned up and it became quite a thing, but he was in his 60s, late 60s by that time.

Brett McKay: Well, and he had been writing a long time too, like since the ’30s.

Beau L’Amour: Yes, yes.

Brett McKay: So that’s a great example of sometimes a career success, it takes a long time to develop, it’s not gonna happen overnight. He was not an overnight success.

Beau L’Amour: He was not an overnight success, not at all.

Brett McKay: So your dad, he wrote incredible stories, but I think his greatest story was probably the life he himself lived and he tells this story in his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, it’s one of my favorite books. ‘Cause every time I read it, I just get super inspired, I also feel convicted, I’m like, “What am I doing with my life? I’m wasting it. I need to be more like Louis.” So let’s talk about your dad’s life ’cause it’s really fascinating and I wanna offer kind of a thumbnail sketch of his early adventures. So your dad was born in North Dakota in 1908, his family faced some financial difficulties starting in the 1920s, so they pulled up shop and went on this eight year journey, crisscrossing America, looking for work and trying to start a new life. And during that time, Louis, like he was only 14 or 15 years old, he got separated from his family somehow. There was some kind of miscommunication about where he needed to be.

So he was looking for them, but he was also working, he skinned cattle, he bailed hay, joined a circus, he rode the rails a bit as a hobo and worked in some mines and then he even went out to sea as a merchant seaman. And he was also doing some boxing during this time.

Beau L’Amour: He started boxing back in North Dakota.

Brett McKay: Okay.

Beau L’Amour: So his older brothers were pretty good boxers, he had friends that introduced him to a couple of professional boxers. And so as a kid, he was a pretty good amateur fighter, I don’t know when his first professional fight was. I know a very, very early professional fight was when he and his parents and adopted brother got to New Mexico they were out of gas money and he and John, his adopted brother, both went on the ticket of this local fight and there’s actually posters for this fight and everything else. My dad was fighting as Jack Leonard because all of the cool fighters in the early ’20s were Jewish, and he faced a young guy from Mexico who he later learned had had something like 200 fights in Mexico. He said, “I never saw so many gloves in my life.”

But they got their gas money and were able to continue on.

Brett McKay: After one of his stints working the mines, he heads to California, what does he do at this point?

Beau L’Amour: Yeah, he went out to California and he met some people, he made some connections through boxing with some people who were in the movie business. And he kind of got to know some of those people as a wannabe or up and coming boxer, but he really wanted to go to sea. So went down to San Pedro, signed up to get aboard a ship, but it was in the middle of a time, I can’t remember if there was a strike or something was going on and the opportunities for shipping off the West Coast were not particularly good. I think he said there was something like 400 seamen ahead of him on the list. And so he lived on the streets of San Pedro in very, very rough conditions, sleeping in lumber piles and abandoned houses and things like this for three or four months. And just accidentally got a ship to the Far East and it was a ship that nobody really wanted to sign onto, it was kind of a crumbling ship.

But he went all the way around the world, Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaya, Egypt, Arabia, and got off of it in New York, spent some time in New York and then got on another ship headed for Los Angeles, down the coast through the canal and to Los Angeles, that was a tanker.

Brett McKay: And all these experiences that he had, riding the rails, the mine work, going out to sea, this showed up later in his writing, like he wasn’t doing all this stuff to get fodder for stories. But later, when he did start writing, he called upon these firsthand experiences.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. He was just trying to work. The idea of going to sea wasn’t so much for the adventure of it, but if you got on a good ship, you could stay on that crew for years. And he was looking for something that would basically allow him to just relax about having to make money just to have a job that he could keep doing.

Brett McKay: As I read about this part of your dad’s life when he was a teenager and his early 20s, it reminded me a lot of Jack London. Like Jack London rode the rails, he was a boxer, he went off to sea, he was the Seawolf. Was your father a fan of Jack London?

Beau L’Amour: He was, very much.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Do you think he was like purposely trying to follow the steps of the Seawolf or it was just like, that’s just what boys did back then.

Beau L’Amour: No, I think there may have been a… There was certainly a lot of other romantic literature that dealt with going to sea. It was also the only way that you could possibly see the world, number one, no air travel, number two, in my dad’s case, no money. So you had to do it as a worker, that was a way of working your way to foreign places. And certainly in my dad’s day, if you had been to Canada or Mexico, that was as foreign a place as an awful lot of Americans ever got. And certainly if anybody traveled farther than that on vacation, they were amongst the one tenth of 1% of the wealthiest people in the country.

Brett McKay: Right.

Beau L’Amour: So not only because it was expensive, but because it took a lot of time, LA to Yokohama, the first leg of my dad’s journey west from San Pedro was, I think, 22 days. Travel was just very slow, a liner would do it, a passenger liner would probably do it in five, but even so, maybe seven. So it was a different time, but I think he did have a vision of wanting to do certain things, but more of it was financial, he wasn’t really looking for adventure. Just on the Jack London front, London wrote an essay, you couldn’t really call it a short story, but he wrote a piece on riding the rails called Holding Her Down. And it is one of the best examples of the kind of work you had, you didn’t just jump on a boxcar and go someplace. It’s like as you started into any place where the train stopped, you had to get off while the train was still moving and then run as fast as you could to get to the track where the train was gonna depart.

Because if you were on the train while it was stopped, the train crew would throw you off. And so you had to get off while the train was still moving and you couldn’t get on until the train was moving because the train crew had to be on the train. And so it was quite a physical adventure, it wasn’t… And I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this, but you don’t sleep in a boxcar while the train’s moving, the ride is horrific, you will beat yourself to a concussion if you do that. And so a boxcars ride very, very hard and you wanna be in them with your knees broken a little bit, and you’re just like… It’s almost like riding a horse in some cases. So it’s a very physically demanding way of travel.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and for sure. So after your dad’s that one stint at sea, he comes back and then in his early 30s, he served in World War II.

Beau L’Amour: That is correct.

Brett McKay: That’s pretty old for a serviceman, were they calling him like grandpa?

Beau L’Amour: He was old. Yeah, well, they were calling… So as the… Before the war, but as it looked like the United States was gearing up its military, he tried to get in the Navy because he’d had not like full-time professional experience in the merchant marine, but he’d had one decently sized trip to sea and one extraordinarily long trip to sea and figured that he knew something about that and that was something that he’d like to do. But he wanted to be an officer and the Navy wasn’t accepting officers who didn’t have any college and so he backed off of that. The first draft call up came and it included, gosh, everybody under a certain age, I don’t know what it was, but he was definitely in that category, and he went in and they basically looked at his mouth and they looked at his heart and they decided he wasn’t soldier material. So he didn’t have good teeth and they didn’t wanna spend the money fixing soldiers teeth in those days.

And they thought he had an… He did have kind of an enlarged heart because he’d been an athlete, he’d been a prize fighter and he was drinking a lot of coffee. So I think his pulse was very fast and they were sort of like, “Oh, you’re at death’s door, you’re gonna have heart problems, go home and deal with it.” And he went and saw another doctor and the doctor said, “You’re a boxer, right?” “Yes.” “You drink a lot of coffee?” “An awful lot of coffee.” Well, he’s like, “Stop it with the coffee and you’ll be fine.” And so then Pearl Harbor happened and everybody was called back, anybody that hadn’t been taken. And at that point, all you had to do is have a pulse, they didn’t care. And so he went, he was drafted into the army, he went in as an officer candidate to the tank destroyers. So he was in officer’s candidate school for the tank destroyers, which was kind of a special warfare outfit. They were definitely the prestige armor outfit in the US army.

He got a very, very good education. They had lots of map reading, lots of artillery training, lots of stuff that was pretty sophisticated. And as an aside at this point, my dad’s interest in doing research and getting the locations right and everything else, if he hadn’t been to a location, my dad was really able to extract a tremendous amount of info from a map and a lot of it came from his artillery and tank destroyer training. So while he was in the tank destroyers, he turned 34, there was a cutoff that they established later on after he had… This was very early in the war and all these different rules were being figured out, they didn’t quite know what age they wanted different people. But anyway, by the time he graduated from tank destroyer school, they didn’t want combat soldiers who were over 34. So they sent him on, he went into the transportation corps.

And in the transportation corps the first thing he did was he went up to the upper peninsula of Michigan in the winter to test winter gear, they thought he was equipped for that because he was from North Dakota. Luckily for him, he spent a fair amount of the time that he was up there coaching a Golden Gloves team an Army Golden Gloves team, so he spent a lot of that time in Milwaukee and Chicago. And then they sent him west to San Francisco, where he was supposed to be a cargo control officer in San Francisco sending Army Cargos out to the Pacific, that lasted a really short period of time. He was hanging around the office late one Friday and an order came in for a bunch of officers and they just said, “You, you, you, you.” He was one of them, get on this train and they put him on this train and I don’t think anybody had any idea what they were doing. The train went all the way south to Los Angeles, all the way east into Georgia, all the way up the east coast of the United States.

And it was just collecting soldiers the whole way, very secretive. Well, these were the, like the last wave of guys that were gonna go over for the invasion of Normandy. And so he got to England and during the invasion, he was a… Like a traffic control officer putting stuff on ships in England. That sounds kind of passe, but wow, I went over and looked at the area where they did this, they would have the ships in a place called Portland Island, in this case. And parking lots full of trucks and tanks and landing craft, whatever they were using up this long causeway in England itself, not really on the island. And if you didn’t sort out exactly what had to go on the ship before it hit that causeway, there was no room to straighten anything out, it was an incredible job. They had vehicles backed up for dozens of miles and everything had to be perfect or the wrong stuff would arrive at the wrong time.

And then when he got to… Finally got to France, he was in charge of a platoon of gasoline tanker trucks that were delivering fuel to the front lines.

Brett McKay: Okay. So first part of his life, that first part of his life, lots of adventures, picking up experiences that he would put into his stories later on when he started writing. And then also he was just talking to people and getting stories from the people he talked to. And then another thing he did, the other thing I just, I find so inspiring about your father’s life, not only the adventures he went on, he was also just reading all the time when he was on these adventures. He was a prodigious reader and this he accounts all the stuff that he reads in Education of a Wandering Man. In the back of the book, he has this, a list of bibliography of books and plays he read from 1930 to 1935. And it’s just, it’s a ton. Like it just… It’s like pages and pages of stuff he read, everything… Okay, just kind of looking at it, Frederick Nietzsche, he read Ralph Waldo Emerson, a lot of Eugene O’Neill, he was reading Voltaire.

Let’s see here, Upton Sinclair, he would just, he’d also read detective stories. Like he was not… It seems like he wasn’t very discriminatory on what he read, he was just like, “If I got something to read, I’m gonna read it.”

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. Well some of it was what was available, some of it late… If you look at a lot of the titles in the late 1930s, he had a job. It wasn’t much of a job, it didn’t really pay him very much, but he had a job reviewing books for a newspaper in Oklahoma. And so he would just read whatever they sent him and they let him keep the books. So he really did it for that. And so, yeah, he just… Anything he could get his hands on. I mean, if you were to go to my mother’s house today, you would see a library with, I don’t know, last time we bothered to count we were over 17,000 books.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah.

Brett McKay: That’s like a bookstore. That sounds like Larry McMurtry. Like Larry McMurtry had that giant book collection that he turned into a bookstore.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah, no, it was the only thing that my father was the least bit materialistic about. He just loved his books and collecting books and having books on different subjects and very, very wide ranging subjects and incredible collection of weird periodicals too. So all kinds of magazines on like strange aspects of science and nature and history and things like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. My favorite books that he would sometimes talk about were these like really obscure books about specific locations in the Southwest. Like there’s probably only a 100 printed, but he wanted to learn about the history of this particular area of New Mexico. I like that style there.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Do you think there are any writers or philosophers who had a big impact on his thinking? If you look at his work and his writing?

Beau L’Amour: No, I’m gonna say, look at what today people would call like the great books. They’re real classics, the Greeks, things like that. Yes, for sure. He was very interested in the development of science and philosophical thought in the Renaissance era. And then in the 1930s, a lot of the people who were making the world at that time, so he read Marx and Engels and all those. It’s like think what you want about them. But they were definitely the most very historically important writers. And so, yeah, I don’t know too many that I would say too many philosophically or something like that. But he was definitely interested in everything he could get his hands on.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think the big takeaway from that his reading is you don’t need to go to school to get an education. I think 10th grade was his last bit of education.

Beau L’Amour: He didn’t even finish the class.

Brett McKay: Didn’t even finish 10th grade. But he… I mean if you look at his reading, like he knew a lot and it enriched his life. Again, your education doesn’t end with schooling. You can keep reading like he kept reading ’till the day he died.

Beau L’Amour: Absolutely. Absolutely. The downside of not getting schooling is you don’t get a chance to talk about your ideas with other people who’ve been exposed to the same ones which he had issues with. Another one of… I just mentioned Marx, one of the interesting things about his life, especially in the 1930s, was at least you could get the commies to talk to you. It’s sort of like you could throw around ideas with these people and if you were out in the middle of a bunch of… With a bunch of laborers, you could always end up finding somebody who could talk about kind of communist philosophy and things like that. Whereas you couldn’t find that other places and those people couldn’t talk about anything else, is the only thing they’d really been educated in a lot of times.

And there were some subjects that came up like that history everywhere, but it was always local. You could always find somebody who would tell you about the local history. You might not be able to talk to them about the impact of the French and Indian War or something like that. But you could get ’em to tell you about when this area was settled or this thing happened or what their great-grandfather did. And so these were the places where he had an opportunity to involve himself with other minds as a young man. Whereas a lot of the stuff he studied was just more… He was kind of on his own. It was just whatever he had the opportunity to read, he had the opportunity to read.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So just looking at this bibliography he wrote in Education of a Wandering Man, it seemed like each year he was reading about 120 books a year. I mean that’s impressive. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So when did your dad decide to become a professional writer and what was his first work like?

Beau L’Amour: Well, he had worked as a sports writer in Prescott. He had written a couple of things when he was there. He wrote a column on boxing for a newspaper in Oregon for a while. I mean, these are… This is not impressive writing even for sports. I mean sports writing in those days was actually kind of a high art. And this didn’t reach even the low art of sports writing. But he was doing it. Later on, I’m gonna guess he got back together with his parents and they all moved to Oklahoma. They moved into a little farm that his oldest brother owned and he lived there with him throughout the 1930s. And I think once they stopped in a particular place, he really had to do something with his life. He was getting older and he was in the house with his dad who was always a really hardworking guy and he needed to do something.

And he didn’t have any skills. He didn’t have any other skills. And so he had been writing poetry for a while. I mean, to a certain… So the thing about poetry is because the meter and the rhyme are like mnemonics. If you got a mind like my dad, you can write it without any paper. The meter and rhyme help you remember what you’re doing. And so he had been doing that. I think he started lecturing on his travels and things of that sort. And he wanted to be someone. And I think at first he more wanted to be someone than he wanted to be a writer. But then he realized he had to kind of sit down and do it. And he wrote a series of stories that now exist in the book Yondering and the novel No Traveller Returns.

This is… I kind of jokingly call this Louis 1.0. This was the first version that he had of his life as a writer. And they were adventure stories, but they were personal and they were realistic. They weren’t overly romanticized or melodramatic. And he got pretty good notices for them. He got good reviews, he was in good magazines, but the type of magazines he was in were so good. They didn’t pay anything. They were like literary journals and things like that. And that wasn’t gonna cut it. And so eventually he started writing more melodramatic stuff for the Pulps. Now maybe I should kind of talk about the magazine market, like what the Pulps really were.

Brett McKay: Yeah, let’s talk about the Pulps. ‘Cause like a lot of, I mean a lot of famous writers that we know about today, like they got their start in the Pulps, Dashiell Hammett. All these guys. So tell us about the Pulp business and how did the Pulp Magazine business kind of craft or shape your dad as a writer?

Beau L’Amour: Okay, so first off, kind of the business of it, there were really three different types of magazines that were published in the early 20th century, even the late 19th century. And they were what they called the literary magazines, which is what my dad had been publishing in. And those were magazines that came out of college campuses and various literary, some of ’em were literary journals, things like this. They didn’t pay anything, but they often had very good writing. Then there were the slick magazines. They’re called slick because the paper was shiny and slick. So it could take colored advertisements and those magazines generally published fiction, but kind of a minimum of it. And they paid very, very well. But they would take forever to figure out what story they wanted to have in what magazine. They always wanted a very artful collection of stories in each magazine.

And they only paid when they actually published. So they could take your story mess around with what edition it was gonna go in, what month it was gonna appear, and keep your story for months and months and months and months without ever paying you. And then there were the Pulps and the Pulps were pure fiction. They were published on Pulp paper, like newsprint. And it didn’t last particularly long. It was only good for black and white ads. So these magazines were less expensive, but the Pulp magazines paid when they accepted your story. So as soon as they said yes, we want this, you got a check. And that was something that was the saving grace for the Pulps. And many a writer’s life ’cause nobody wanted to lose a story for six months while Colliers figured out which month they wanted to put it in.

And the Pulps weren’t incredibly demanding editorially, you could be a writer of modest skill and still get published. They were very, very much a volume operation. There were hundreds of magazines on, hundreds of subjects and each one published quite a few short stories. And some of them published short stories and novels at the same time. And so they were a place where a writer could make a living and get better. All you had to do is be able to write fast ’cause they didn’t pay very well. And so in my dad’s case they really taught him to write quickly and to write in a very, very entertaining manner. They were into the blood and guts, they were into the plot moving quickly. In his case he wrote a lot of short stories. So the material was relatively 10 to 20 pages. And it was a terrific training ground because he could train himself and survive at the same time and get better. In today’s world we’ve got a lot of winner take all industries. You can come in as a genius and do really well, but there aren’t too many places where you can kind of develop your talent and still make a living. It’s very rare these days, especially in the entertainment arts.

Brett McKay: Yeah. There’s like no place to be like a middle class writer. It’s harder to do that.

Beau L’Amour: It’s very hard to do that. I mean the music business is one place ’cause you can play bars until you get good, but there’s nothing like that for a writer. And so it was a wonderful opportunity. Most important for my dad was it trained him to write directly from his unconscious. Instead of sitting there going, okay, what am I gonna do now? He was able to kind of open the doors to his unconscious and just write what showed up. And this does not come easily. It’s not something that’s normal. I think that the thing that I’ve always thought it was most like was improv comedy where you just, if you can kind of learn to open your mind and free associate from one thing to another, once you get pretty good at doing it, good stuff comes out. But very important for my dad, very important for his later work ethic.

You do not wanna stop because when that conduit to your unconscious gives itself an opportunity to close, there’s something about it that wants to stay closed. And so I’ve experienced this in my life ’cause I tend to work on a creative project that, or work on a project where it’s very creative, but then I go off and do all kinds of technical details that have to do it. And that technical detail period really kind of allows me to close down creatively. And it’s very, very hard to get started again for the next one.

Brett McKay: So the Pulps helped him to be productive ’cause like he had… He ate what he killed basically. And he had to…

Beau L’Amour: That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay: He had to sell a story like at least once a… That was sell a story, not just finish a story. It was like sell a story every week to get paid. So what was his workday like? Was he up from 8 o’clock in the morning and then just riding ’till 8 o’clock at night? What was a typical workday like for your dad?

Beau L’Amour: More like 5:30 in the morning.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Beau L’Amour: So up very early, butt in chair, sit at the typewriter work until the kids are ready to have breakfast, go into the next room, have breakfast with the kids. He would read to us every morning. A lot of times it was stuff he was interested in. Sometimes it was stuff we were interested in. But when we were little kids, he read to us every morning. And then when we went to school, he was back at work, work until lunch, lunch, back at work for an hour or two. Then he generally took an hour or two off to exercise and clean up from that dinner. After dinner, he often worked another hour or two, seven days a week, 365 days a year, pretty much only taking off when the publisher sent him off on a publicity trip or something like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Or you said that if he needed to do some research, he would travel then maybe to maybe go scope out a little bit.

Beau L’Amour: Yes. But he’d still work.

Brett McKay: Yeah, he’d still work.

Beau L’Amour: He’d take a typewriter with him and he’d still work.

Brett McKay: Alright. So just a really strong work ethic. Did he enjoy it? Like did he have to struggle and was just this tortured writer? Or did he genuinely love being there on the typewriter? Just click clacking away, cranking out a story?

Beau L’Amour: He loved it. I think one of the magic for a reader is reading something that just the person who was writing it, the joy of creating it is just seeped into every letter of what he’s doing. So I think the energy with which he wrote translates out to the reader in incredible energy and incredible happiness that he’s doing this. So the tortured thing was not something that got him anywhere that he was really… That really was doing him any favors. And he wasn’t tortured. He was just very, very, he was thrilled to be doing it. And another important thing about how he worked, I mean actually what he put on the page, dad wrote in a very abbreviated style. And in many cases the details were very sketchy. And what this does was, it’s just enough to inspire the reader’s imagination.

So your job as the writer, especially if you’re one of these writers that came out of the Pulp world of writing short stories and things like this, is to put just enough on the page to turn the reader into a partner in the imagination of the story. And that’s really what makes a lot of that writing so wonderful. You won’t hear too many people in the kind of more literary side of the business talking about this. In fact kind of more literate writing tends to write down absolutely every single thing. But that’s not really a way to engage an audience. You really engage an audience by giving them just enough. It’s a trick. You got to be able to give them just enough without giving them too little. But it creates a wonderful reading experience.

Brett McKay: So in the first part of your dad’s career, when he was writing for the Pulps, he was writing all sorts of different stories, adventure stories. I think he did a few boxing stories. When did he become known as a Western writer? How did he become the Western author that we know him today as?

Beau L’Amour: Yeah, so Westerns had been a part of the Pulp Magazine market since the 1880s. I mean, really since the dime novels, but not huge. And what happened, especially related to my dad who had written a lot of adventure stories kind of based on his travels or very melodramatically based on his travels. Before World War II, nobody traveled internationally and exotic places were very interesting to people after World War II. Well, everybody had seen their children, their buddies die in exotic places. The adventure genre kind of created a certain amount of PTSD or something like this. And people were recognizing it in the magazine business as my dad was recognizing it to a certain extent, maybe unconsciously in his own world. And I think that the Western boomed after World War II, because it was an adventure environment that you could have writing and movies and everything else in, but it was sort of safely in the past and it was at home.

And so he went to a, I think New Year’s Eve party, 1946, he wasn’t even out of the military yet with a publisher’s party, a publisher that he knew very well. And the guy told him he says, we think now Westerns and you know something about this. You kind of grew up in that environment you should do this. And so throughout the mid ’40s, so ’46, ’47, he started transitioning to more and more Westerns. By ’48 or ’49, he was going full-bore writing Western short stories for the Pulps. In many cases, he was selling… In probably three or four years, he sold 50 stories a year, which means he had to write like 60 or more to do that. He was writing more than a story a week, going full out and just able to make due, he could buy himself some nice clothes.

He had a tiny little… He had a little room in the back of somebody else’s apartment, didn’t have a car, wasn’t gonna be able to afford anything like that on what he was doing. And then the Pulp magazines, because of radio, because of television, because of the rise of the paperback, the Pulp magazine started to collapse. And he had a very difficult few years. I remember him telling me that he would go to the park in the morning at breakfast time so that his landlady wouldn’t realize he didn’t have enough money for breakfast and start getting worried whether he’d pay the rent or not. And during that time, he wrote a story called The Gift of Cochise, which he sent to his Pulp editor and they didn’t want it. And he had kind of a sleazy agent who hadn’t really been good for much and kind of in desperation, he sent it to that guy and that guy sold it to Colliers, which was a top market.

And he made a bunch of money. I mean, it wasn’t life changing money, but it was four or five times what he would’ve made for a Pulp story. And that was placed in Colliers magazine and then it was optioned by John Wayne. This became the movie Hondo. And as soon as it was optioned, he took the Option money. Option is like you rent a story for a while to see if you can get the pieces together to make a movie out of it. He took the Option money and flew to New York and just barged into the face of like every editor at every paperback house he could find. And he had some manuscripts he hadn’t been able to sell, various things like this. And he kind of stuck stuff in front of them and just said, I’ve got a movie coming out with John Wayne, I’ve been writing Westerns, I wanna be your Western writer. And just fired the full force of his personality onto them. And he sold four books on that trip. And that basically started him writing paperback original Westerns, that was like 1954, 1953.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And at this time, he hit the wave like the America, that’s what they wanted. They wanted the Western and he was able to ride that wave.

Beau L’Amour: Yeah. Although I would say that he didn’t really start distinguishing himself. I think he wrote some… Actually some of the best writing that he wrote was in the, maybe the early 1960s. But I don’t know that he really necessarily distinguished himself from the pack. What was interesting was is as the Western started to decline a little bit and he started writing more and more different Westerns, this would’ve been again towards the end of the 60s, early 70s, right before he really exploded sales wise. That’s when the material gets particularly interesting and he starts doing different things with it.

Brett McKay: Why did it explode in the 70s, you think?

Beau L’Amour: Well, first off critical mass of backlist titles, he just had so many titles in the marketplace. None of ’em were going out of print. All of ’em were making money all the time. So that’s the big one. I think something that’s important at this moment is that once he’d written 12, 15 Westerns, he felt that he wanted to go back and write in other genres because that’s what he’d done as a Pulp writer. And he didn’t really realize that the paperback business isn’t organized that way. They don’t like you to change genres because the books are in the bookstore, organized by genre. And so when a writer starts writing in one particular genre, the publishers want him to stay there. And dad didn’t really wanna stay there and he kept trying to break out. He wrote some stories that had other… In other genres, Ii was actually, the Walking drum was written in 1960.

It wasn’t published until the 80s, but it was written in 1960. That’s a set in like, year 1200 Europe. It’s a between the Crusades Adventure story in Europe. And he did some other stuff like that trying to break out of it. Last of the Breed, his Cold War thriller was conceived at that time. It’s based on the Gary Powers U2 incident. But nobody wanted this stuff. So he went back to writing Westerns, but he decided he was gonna change the Westerns. He was gonna write different kids of Westerns. So he would write Chaco, which was a Western about Europeans on Safari in the West, something that happened, but people don’t really know about it too much. He would write The Broken Gun, which was a contemporary Western.

It was set at the time, late 1950s when it actually occurred. But it was about a mystery set further back in the west in the 19th century. And other stories, he did a little bit of science fictiony stuff with the Californias. He started changing it up and by the early 1970s, the audience for Westerns wasn’t so brittle any longer and it was open to different experiences as a lot of things were in the 1970s. And so he was able to do various different things. All the backlist titles were doing very well. The Centennial was coming up and he started writing stories about the early frontier, which meshed with people’s interest in the Revolutionary War because, 1976 was the Bicentennial of 1776 and things all really came together right about that time.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So he had this plan. He didn’t like being pigeonholed as a Western writer, but he had to figure out a way to transition without upsetting one the audience, ’cause they expect a certain type of thing. And then two, the publisher. So he played around the margins with the Western to do what he wanted.

Beau L’Amour: Correct.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Beau L’Amour: Very correct.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, when you look at your dad’s writing, the stories are… They’re very entertaining. I love reading your dad’s novels, the short stories, but it seems like subtly there’s like a message there. Do you think your dad had a message that he was trying to convey with his stories as besides just being entertaining?

Beau L’Amour: Not consciously. I know sometimes when you read this stuff you go, really, that was unconscious, but dad, he just wrote so fast. And like I said, he opened up his unconscious and just let it happen. He had things that he cared about. And if you… Look, if you’re writing Westerns, there is no alternative. Westerns are about the friction between civilization and the wilderness. It’s just a fundamental. And so you get a big thematic thing just by saying, I’m writing a Western after that, I’m sure you’re quite aware of this. There’s this issue with families and family connections and the solidity that comes from having a good family that will help you out and things of that sort. It’s odd. It’s ironic because my dad spent a lot of time, not… Getting away from his family, not getting away from it because he didn’t like it, but just wanting to go off by himself and explore and do different things.

Brett McKay: And so there’s this interesting push pull friction in his work where a lot of his work is about the solidity of family. And yet that wasn’t necessarily what he was all about, especially earlier in his life. He certainly was when I was a kid, but not earlier. There’s an interesting theme about adopted parents, a older man will adopt a boy and raise that boy. Now orphans are a thing in literature. This is all Jungian stuff, there’s a lot of orphans in mythology. And so maybe he just clued into that unconsciously and was dealing with it. But one further level to that, my mom and dad were like surrogate parents for an awful lot of my friends and my sister’s friends. I think, we lived… We were growing up in the 60s and 70s and times were turbulent, especially in families. And my family is very solid. And it’s interesting how my parents became secondary parents to an awful lot of our friends.

So you are overseeing your dad’s legacy and you’ve worked to publish some of his unpublished writing. Can you tell us about some of the work you’re doing with your dad’s estate and his legacy?

Beau L’Amour:Well, we’ve just about finished this, Louis L’Amour’s lost Treasures series. So Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is, it’s the story behind the story or it’s a bit of a professional biography of my dad. So I took about 30 of his previously published books and added a postscript, which talks about different aspects of the book. Sometimes I have alternative drafts of part of the book or a correspondence that tells part of the story of how it came to be. Sometimes I’ll do a postscript on how the movie was made or wasn’t made because it failed. A lot of things like that. There’s a series of stories where dad was working out editorial issues with Bantam books and you can see the push pull between what they wanted in the book or what he wanted to see in the book.

And so I described those things. There were a couple of stories that really came out of a friendship that he had with Katharine Hepburn, and they never ended up working on a film together, but their discussion of what he wanted to do and what she wanted to do led certain stories to be written. So there’s that. And then there’s also, part of this series is two new books, Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures Volume One and Volume Two. And these are mostly beginnings of stories that dad never finished, but a lot of times I will have… He left behind an outline or he left behind notes for what the story was gonna be. And so I’ll give you the beginning of the story or whatever I’ve got of it, and then I will, give you the notes and explain what he was trying to do with his story, what he was trying to do with his career, how I think the story would’ve ended.

There’s a few finished short stories in that also. And then last of all, there’s a novel No Travel or Returns, which is one of those early yondering stories. It was really dad’s first novel, but he never really finished it. He started it in 1937. He worked on it on and off until he was drafted. And it was a pile of chapters and episodes that hung together, just barely. And so I went in and did a bunch of research to try and figure out what he was up to and how he might have finished that. And I rewrote that and we published that a few years ago. So Louis L’Amour’s lost Treasures that… You don’t have to read it in any particular order, but the wonderful thing about it is that because the story is there, because you’ve read the story, then what I have to say about the story is, easily understandable. If I was to try and write the professional biography of Louis L’Amour in a book separate from all this stuff, it would be very difficult ’cause I’d have to describe each individual story. And so this is a… I think we have one or two more of the Postscripts to do and maybe one more larger project in that. And then it’s, it’s onto something else.

Brett McKay: Well, Beau this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about, Louie L’Amour and your work?

Beau L’Amour: Louis lamour.com. L-O-U-I-S-L-A-M-O-U-R.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Beau L’Amour, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Beau L’Amour: Thank you very much. Take care.

Brett McKay: My guest name is Beau L’Amour. He’s the son of the author Louis L’Amour and he’s also the manager of his estate. You can find more information about Louis’ [e-mail]. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/lamour. You can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’ve done so already, I’d appreciate it. If you take one minute to give us review on podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with our friend or family member who would get something out of it. As always, thank for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Not just listening on the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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