L’AMOUR, LOUIS

(1908–1988)

Born Louis Dearborn LaMoore in North Dakota, Louis L’Amour is one of the most prolific Western fiction writers of all time. His novels still dominate sales of paperback Westerns. Like other novelists, Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Clarence Mulford, many of L’Amour’s novels became Western films. His novels are characterized by L’Amour’s famous claim to historical authenticity, especially geographic authenticity. If the novel describes a character crawling down a gully toward a wash, you can be sure, L’Amour fans claim, that the author had climbed down that same gully at one time or another. Recent critics, while not disputing such claims, question the overall fictional authenticity of the novels. L’Amour novels that have been made into films include Catlow,Shalako, Kid Rodelo, Taggart, Guns of the Timberland, Heller in Pink Tights, Apache Territory, The Tall Stranger, Utah Blaine, The Burning Hills, Blackjack Ketchum: Desperado, Stranger on Horseback, Treasure of Ruby Hills, Four Guns to the Border, and Hondo. It was Hondo (1953) that established L’Amour’s reputation. The highly successful film, starring John Wayne and Geraldine Page (who won an Oscar for best supporting actress), was ostensibly based on L’Amour’s novel Hondo. L’Amour was originally nominated for an Oscar for best writing, but the nomination was withdrawn when it was discovered that the film was not based on a novel but on L’Amour’s short story “The Gift of Cochise,” published in Collier’s magazine. Recently, Lee Clark Mitchell has shown that even the novel, Hondo, L’Amour’s first big seller, was actually an unauthorized novelization of the screenplay by James Edward Grant. L’Amour did eventually write an acknowledged novelization of the film How the West Was Won (1962).