L’Amour’s Legacy : Family Unearths Jumble of Manuscripts in Late Author’s Study

Louis L’Amour, the novelist of the American frontier whose books continue to entertain presidents and construction workers, left a real mess behind when he died last year.

His family is the first to admit how bad it was--a “toxic dump” of maybe a couple tons of papers stacked chaotically on nearly every square inch of the floor and desk of the big room where L’Amour turned out novels and stories almost as fast as the U.S. Mint stamps out quarters.

But the mess in the book-lined office of L’Amour’s West Los Angeles home almost certainly will turn out to be a mint, too. In the jumble and tumble of newspaper clippings, magazines, maps, letters, screenplays, film treatments and manuscript copies, L’Amour’s family found enough unpublished--or long out of print--writing to keep L’Amour riding tall on best-seller lists for years.

The unpublished works are part of an already staggering publishing inheritance left by L’Amour, author of more than 100 books and once labeled by a critic as a sociological rather than a literary phenomenon because of his huge popularity. Now his wife, son and daughter, accustomed to remaining in the background while L’Amour handled the responsibilities of fame and success, are emerging to manage and promote his legacy.

“We have a couple of full-length novels and we have some (unpublished) short story material and we have short story material that was written for the pulps,” said Kathy L’Amour, the novelist’s wife of 32 years in a joint interview with her children Beau and Angelique. “So we’re in good shape and we’ll have a publishing program well into the ‘90s.”

Kathy and her children remember L’Amour with obvious fondness and no apparent sadness. More often than not, they laughed when recounting the habits and humors of the novelist who became a household word as a paperback writer, and late in life made the leap to successful hardcover novelist with the publication of such works as “The Walking Drum” and “The Haunted Mesa.” (L’Amour was so popular that readers wrote to tell him they named their children after his characters, mainly pioneers of the Old West.)

In recent months, Kathy L’Amour said she has taken over her husband’s former office and--like the rest of the flower-filled, rambling, Western-motif house--it is polished, neat, attractive and comfortable. Indeed her husband’s messiness is something of a family legend as well as an in-joke. (The papers, clippings, maps, manuscripts and an estimated 40,000 fan letters have been bound or filed and tucked away in storage in the L’Amour home.)

“I used to kid him and tell him that he files in piles,” Kathy L’Amour said. “His method of filing was crazy. He just stacked stuff up.”

Beau, 28, was the first to make the foray into his father’s dangerous den. “I took about seven days of randomly walking around and randomly sampling stuff to try and find if there was any order or not,” he recalled. “After that week I just decided there wasn’t any order.”

Said Angelique, 25: “Dad always said he could find anything he wanted. (But) we all know that took a lot longer than he thought.”

A lengthy search for a missing paper or map was an entertaining diversion for L’Amour, who had a relentless writing schedule, his wife remembered. “He really liked looking for it, you see, because when he looked for something in a pile . . . he would come across all kinds of interesting things he hadn’t seen for six months or two years or five years or whatever. So he had a really good time when he had to look. It would have made me crazy.”

Yet after L’Amour’s fatal illness was diagnosed early in 1988, the room where he worked and created an extravagant clutter did cause a brief moment of pain, Kathy L’Amour said. “After he knew he was sick and he was down there one day and he was starting to clean up his room and I knew what he was thinking,” she said. “I got very upset and I said, ‘Oh please, please don’t touch this room. Don’t spend whatever time you’ve got on this room.’ He looked at me and he was so happy. He went right to the typewriter and wrote another chapter . . .”

Until a couple of weeks before Louis L’Amour died, he and his family kept his illness a secret. Moreover, the disease was seldom mentioned around the house.

“We just told everybody that he had a viral pneumonia that was very, very tough to get rid of and he was able to carry it off for quite awhile,” Kathy L’Amour said. “He was remarkable. He and I didn’t talk about it. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life talking about his illness. To him that was rather boring and really not much fun. He would rather hear a good joke, he would rather read his books, he would rather be at the typewriter creating something.”

Actually, a casual observer who didn’t know that the 80-year-old L’Amour, a nonsmoker, died of lung cancer in June, 1988, wouldn’t have many clues that he was gone. A posthumous work, “Education of a Wandering Man,” was published a few weeks ago and already is on both the New York Times and The Los Angeles Times bestseller lists for hardcover, nonfiction books.

The memoir, which L’Amour was proofreading the day he died, is the author’s 105th published book, an output composed of 86 novels, 16 collections of short stories and three nonfiction works. In addition, a hard-cover book, “The Sackett Companion,” and two paperback collections of short stories, “Lonigan” and “Long Ride Home,” have been published since his death.

At the time of his death, daughter Angelique was on the promotion trail with a book she had compiled, “A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour,” which also rode the bestseller list for 11 weeks.

Next May, “The Outlaws of Mesquite,” a collection of eight short stories published decades ago in long-forgotten pulp magazines will be issued in hardcover, a first for a L’Amour book of short stories. No date has been set for publication of the two novels which “will need some editing,” according to Stuart Applebaum, L’Amour’s editor at Bantam Books, his longtime publisher. Both novels are adventure stories, not Westerns. Beau L’Amour said his father also left behind a 94-page fragment of a mystery but it is unlikely to ever be published because it apparently is a third or less of the projected book.

Even without upcoming posthumous books, L’Amour’s publishing statistics more resembles the gross national product of a small country than the efforts of one man. All of his books are still in print and about 220 million copies of L’Amour works--mainly paperbacks--have come off the presses over the decades, Applebaum said, making him one of the world’s most popular writers. Most of those numbers were racked up in the final 15 years or so of L’Amour’s life, a period that coincided roughly with the demise of the Western as a film and television genre, Applebaum said, noting that many Western fans apparently filled the gap with L’Amour novels.

“The first 50 million of his books were sold copy-by-copy in the heartland of America,” Applebaum said.

L’Amour was never championed much by book critics, Applebaum acknowledged, although he sometimes was reviewed very favorably. “Education of a Wandering Man” has gotten some good notices, he added, from critics who have been charmed by the rambling, digressive account of L’Amour’s years as a hobo, merchant seaman, mine watchman, day laborer and traveler with an obsession for reading. In that book accounts of close calls in barroom fights and boxing matches are interspersed with lists of classic novels, histories, philosophical works and a host of other volumes that L’Amour--a 10th-grade dropout--read while riding box cars or aboard a freighter steaming across the Pacific.

Copies of the books listed by L’Amour now stand on the shelves of his office, evidence of his passion for self-education. It was a hard-earned learning that L’Amour used in surprising ways. For instance, he told an interviewer in 1984 that the ancient mythical Greek hero Achilles, killed at the siege of Troy, would have been right at home in 19th-Century Dodge City, Kan., where the action was pretty good, too.

On the verge of the 1990s, the surviving L’Amours have practical as well as sentimental reasons for keeping the L’Amour cottage industry humming.

“There’s the business of keeping it up and keeping people interested in it and not just letting it coast,” said Beau L’Amour who has aspirations in film making and has been producing audiotapes of his father’s books. “If we coast, eventually we make less money, we devalue the material.” Besides, he added, his memories of his father are not mainly about his books. “To be extremely blunt, I really think that the material, that’s for other people, that’s for fans. I really think that Dad’s writing was probably the least of him.”

Kathy L’Amour added that part of the family’s purpose is to keep Louis L’Amour as a sort of living presence in the house where they were happy for a long time.

“I think you can’t feel that someone like Louis is dead because his work and his words are around us all the time,” she said. “Maybe the thing that’s most gratifying is that you don’t feel that the rest of the world thinks he’s dead. I think it’s kind of comforting in a way to feel that the rest of the world feels that he’s still here because there are new books coming out and there are new readers doing the old books.”

L’Amour himself knew the chances of being remembered by history were slim. In “Education of a Wandering Man,” he wrote, “Actors, politicians and writers--all of us are but creatures of the hour. Long-lasting fame comes to but a few. Turning the pages of my notebooks, I see so many names, once well known, now all but forgotten.”