Keeping the Old West forever young

In the early days, back when Louis L’Amour had to choose between buying food or books, the 10th-grade dropout and part-time hobo wrote poetry.

He didn’t sell much.

So he tried his hand at adventure stories while moonlighting as a Depression-era boxer, roustabout and merchant marine before he caught on with the low-paying pulp magazines. Then L’Amour discovered westerns, a world where the good guys always won, the bad guys were cleanly and honorably killed and romance was limited to the occasional chaste kiss.

Those books sold.

And they’re still selling. In a career that lasted more than a half-century, L’Amour -- who died of lung cancer in Los Angeles in 1988 -- wrote more than 100 books, all of which are still in print and nearly all first published by Bantam Books, an unusual record of literary fidelity.

To mark the golden anniversary, Bantam and L’Amour’s estate this week began including 300,000 free copies of his first Bantam book, 1955’s “Guns of the Timberlands,” with sales of four other L’Amour titles, and sending another 50,000 L’Amour books to U.S. Navy shipboard libraries.

Altogether, they’re giving away more of his books than many critically acclaimed writers sell in a lifetime, an irony not lost on his publisher.

Critical approval was one thing L’Amour rarely received. Generally dismissed for his formulaic plots and an artless style of writing, L’Amour perpetuated -- and reaped the benefits of -- modern romanticized perceptions of the Old West.

Readers, though, have been faithful, and generous. L’Amour has sold some 300 million books, a third of them since his death, and most titles have sold at least 1 million copies, his publisher says. More than 30 books and short stories have been adapted for movies or television.

Including posthumous releases and new story collections, L’Amour’s bibliography has 120 entries, and the rich vein continues to be mined. The third in a seven-volume collection of previously published L’Amour short stories is due in the fall, following a three-CD dramatization released this spring of “Son of a Wanted Man.”

The material rewards can be seen in L’Amour’s sprawling 5,800-square-foot hacienda-style house near the UCLA campus -- “the house that Bantam built,” his wife says -- and in the 2,000-acre western Colorado ranch the couple bought a few years before his death.

“There’s a remarkable consistency to his sales,” says Irwyn Applebaum, Bantam Dell publisher and editor of 21 L’Amour books. “Someone who had 120 books that he wrote not only published but still in print and still selling every day, that’s a breadth of storytelling success any writer would exchange for critical literary acclaim.”

L’Amour’s fans included presidents Eisenhower and Reagan, and he received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, a friend, wrote the introduction to L’Amour’s posthumous memoir, “Education of a Wandering Man,” which L’Amour, an insatiable worker, was editing the afternoon he died.

L’Amour’s broad success with readers suggests that, critics notwithstanding, he struck a deep connection with a wide swath of American society, says Bill Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

“There is something cultural going on,” Deverell says. “L’Amour, to his credit, was tapping into it and was also a product of it.”

Deverell believes readers found in L’Amour’s books a reinforcement of the western myths that form part of our national identity, defined initially by Owen Wister’s 1902 “The Virginian,” considered the first western novel, and the later stories of Zane Grey, who, like L’Amour, wrote from Southern California. Wister’s novel, which followed Teddy Roosevelt’s landmark four-volume “The Winning of the West,” was set in the post-Civil War years and was published at the start of the new century as the nation was rapidly changing from agrarian to industrial. L’Amour’s books coincided with the Cold War, another time of uncertain national identity.

Definition could be found by looking backward and to the West.

“The moral economy was straightforward and clear, good versus evil, with the power of individuals to make a difference in the service of good,” Deverell says. “Those sorts of tropes were obvious in the fiction, and they were nice hooks into the societal concerns of the period.”

And where critics saw simplicity of style, fans found clarity.

“I think his prose style is really quite wonderful and Hemingwayesque, without the affectations,” says Jane Tompkins, a retired Duke University English professor and author of “West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns.”

Tompkins believes L’Amour’s trouble with critics was based on literary class distinctions that marginalize genre writers. She describes his writing as “beautifully economical ... L’Amour is a great example of a really wonderful formula writer. He knows how to pace. He understands what people are looking for.”

What L’Amour was looking for was a chance to tell stories -- and make money.

“He was very canny about his career,” says Kathy L’Amour, a former television actress (“Gunsmoke” and “Death Valley Days”) who married the author a year after his first Bantam book was published. “His business sense about writing was clear and strong till the day he died.”

When L’Amour started out, she says, most publishers were keeping “big chunks” of movie and other rights. L’Amour decided to write paperback originals, which had mass appeal, and fought to retain the movie rights. One of his early short stories, “Hondo” (expanded into a novel by Fawcett Books in 1953), was filmed by John Wayne, earning L’Amour instant cachet as a writer of westerns.

Still, L’Amour was marginalized even by his publisher for the first part of his career. His books were not published in hardback until the early 1980s, nearly 50 years after he sold his first short story to the pulp magazine True Gang Life in October 1935.

“A jealous writer would say to L’Amour, ‘If my publisher marketed me the way yours marketed you, I could be even more successful than you,’ ” Applebaum says. “He would say, ‘I had to sell 40 to 50 million copies before my publisher did a whole lot more than just print the books.’ ”

A jealous writer might also have been bitter at having been so ignored by critics. But L’Amour wasn’t. His wife says he understood the regional and cultural biases at play.

“He said anything written west of the Allegheny Mountains is considered a western, and anything written on the other side is considered historical,” says Kathy L’Amour. “Once he started to publish in hardcover and started to win enormous honors, then all of a sudden Louis L’Amour was [considered] authentic. He wasn’t any different than he was in the beginning.”

The chain is broken

In many ways, L’Amour was the last in a line. Literary genres are perpetuated through generational handoffs. Agatha Christie passes the baton to Ruth Rendell. Eric Ambler gives rise to Graham Greene, then to John le Carre. But with L’Amour’s death 17 years ago, the western genre has gone stagnant, with no writer rising as a clear heir to his audience. “There’s not a whole lot of westerns being written,” Applebaum says.

Part of L’Amour’s enduring appeal is his own story. Broad-shouldered and just over 6 feet tall, he was partial to a western uniform of bolo ties and cotton work shirts. The western myth is imbued with self-reliant individuals, and L’Amour was cut from that mold. He began writing as a teenager and published his first poem in his hometown paper in Jamestown, N.D., in 1926, at 18. By then he’d been on the road for three years -- he was at port in Singapore, he once noted, when he should have been attending his high school graduation -- after local bank collapses shattered the region’s economic base, according to an official biography.

L’Amour left school early, but he didn’t leave education, his wife says. A voracious reader, he once counted 25 volumes read in one year just waiting at doctor’s offices, job interviews and restaurants. There was no rhyme or reason to most of his selections, and he tended to keep what he read, amassing an estimated 20,000-volume library.

After moving into the house between UCLA and Beverly Hills in 1973, L’Amour often wrote on the veranda, using a piece of plywood with four metal legs as a desk. A decade later, the couple added a library wing, where he worked for the last few years of his life surrounded by books at a broad desk of rough-hewn, polished wood overlooking a sunken dark-walled pool and a manicured yard rimmed with roses.

L’Amour often was awake by 6 a.m. and writing by 7, seven days a week. He rarely rewrote, his wife says, working out his stories and sentences in his head before using two fingers to pound out the pages on a typewriter.

“He felt he wrote better if he wrote a lot,” Kathy L’Amour says. “He always felt he had room to improve.... As a writer, at the end of his life, he felt like he had just gotten a handle on it.”