The Art of Manliness - The Life and Legacy of Louis L'Amour

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.480 With over 300 million books sold, Louis L'Amour is one of the best-selling authors of all time.

00:00:16.860 All 120 of his books remain in print, but the greatest story L'Amour ever penned was his own.

00:00:22.140 He spent the early part of his life traveling in a circus, working as a lumberjack and miner,

00:00:27.180 circling the world as a seaman, winning over 50 fights as a professional boxer, and serving in World War II.

00:00:32.980 Today on the show, I talk about both the personal and professional aspects of Louis' life with his son, Beau L'Amour.

00:00:38.560 We discuss some of Louis' adventures and the autodidactic education he gave himself by way of a voracious reading habit.

00:00:45.520 We then turn to how Louis got started as a writer and how he cut his teeth writing for pulp magazines

00:00:49.880 before breaking through as a Western novelist and becoming a blockbuster success in the 60s.

00:00:54.380 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash L'Amour.

00:01:09.720 All right, Beau L'Amour, welcome to the show.

00:01:12.840 Thank you very much.

00:01:13.740 So you are the son of the famous Western author, Louis L'Amour.

00:01:20.380 And we're going to find out he was more than just a Western author today in this conversation.

00:01:23.800 I know a lot of our listeners are familiar with your dad and his prodigious work.

00:01:28.300 But for those who aren't familiar with Louis L'Amour, can you give us a thumbnail sketch of his career?

00:01:32.380 What was he famous for and how many books did he publish?

00:01:35.880 Sure.

00:01:36.680 Dad was one of the best-selling authors of the 20th century.

00:01:39.900 He's wrote maybe 200, 250 short stories, novels.

00:01:45.880 Over until today, we've sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 330 million copies.

00:01:53.940 Wow.

00:01:54.540 We've never had a title go out of print.

00:01:56.600 That's actually even more impressive.

00:01:58.300 That is.

00:01:59.600 And dad's still in probably the top 50 authors in the world when it comes to yearly sales.

00:02:08.460 That's impressive.

00:02:09.080 And he was mostly famous for his Westerns.

00:02:12.760 That is correct.

00:02:13.420 Absolutely.

00:02:14.360 And then I think some people might have, you know, some of his work, his stories and novels,

00:02:18.060 they got turned into TV shows and movies, correct?

00:02:21.160 About 40 of them, if you include all the TV adaptations.

00:02:25.940 Dad, he did a lot of business in early television in the, you know, 1950s and 60s.

00:02:32.500 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.

00:02:44.660 It was really one of the first television series that was ever produced.

00:02:47.740 And one Western that people have probably seen, it's a John Wayne one, Hondo.

00:02:53.220 Yes.

00:02:53.360 That was based off a short story by your dad, correct?

00:02:55.820 That was, yeah.

00:02:56.620 Yeah.

00:02:57.260 When did you realize growing up that your dad was a famous bestselling author?

00:03:01.620 He wasn't really famous when I was a kid.

00:03:04.060 And so dad really started to hit in the mid-1970s, like the big bestseller kind of things, you know, autograph lines around the block and that kind of thing.

00:03:16.140 And so when I was a child, when I was a very young teenager, he was still kind of struggling.

00:03:22.880 And I mean, we always lived comfortably, but he had to write three or four books a year to let us do that.

00:03:30.440 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.

00:03:40.900 And every time he had a new book come out, it boosted sales on everything in his backlist.

00:03:48.200 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,

00:03:57.880 and it became quite a thing.

00:04:00.900 But he was in his 60s, late 60s by that time.

00:04:04.400 Well, and he had been writing a long time too, like since the 30s.

00:04:07.320 So, I mean, that's a great example of sometimes a career success, it takes a long time to develop.

00:04:13.240 It's not going to happen overnight.

00:04:14.340 He was not an overnight success.

00:04:16.200 He was not an overnight success, not at all.

00:04:18.720 So your dad, you know, he wrote incredible stories,

00:04:21.980 but I think his greatest story was probably the life he himself lived.

00:04:27.000 And he tells this story in his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man.

00:04:30.740 It's one of my favorite books because every time I read it, I just get super inspired.

00:04:35.940 I also feel convicted.

00:04:36.960 I'm like, what am I doing with my life?

00:04:38.300 I'm wasting it.

00:04:39.460 I need to be more like Louie.

00:04:41.340 So let's talk about your dad's life because it's really fascinating.

00:04:44.340 And I want to offer kind of a thumbnail sketch of his early adventures.

00:04:47.840 So your dad was born in North Dakota in 1908.

00:04:50.760 His family faced some financial difficulties starting in the 1920s.

00:04:55.840 So they pulled up shop and went on this eight-year journey, crisscrossing America,

00:05:01.900 looking for work and trying to start a new life.

00:05:05.060 And during that time, Louie, like even when he was 14 or 15 years old,

00:05:08.640 he got separated from his family somehow.

00:05:10.500 There was some kind of miscommunication about where he needed to be.

00:05:13.560 So he was looking for them, but he was also working.

00:05:16.520 He skinned cattle.

00:05:17.740 He baled hay, joined a circus.

00:05:19.840 He rode the rails a bit as a hobo and worked in some mines. 0.73

00:05:25.360 And then he even went out to sea as a merchant seaman.

00:05:28.920 And he was also doing some boxing during this time.

00:05:32.440 He started boxing back in North Dakota.

00:05:34.760 So his older brothers were pretty good boxers.

00:05:37.640 He had friends that introduced him to a couple of professional boxers.

00:05:42.620 And so as a kid, he was a pretty good amateur fighter.

00:05:48.940 I don't know when his first professional fight was.

00:05:52.760 I know a very, very early professional fight was when he and his parents and adopted brother

00:05:58.600 got to New Mexico.

00:05:59.800 They were out of gas money and he and John, his adopted brother, both went on the ticket of this local fight.

00:06:10.060 And there's actually posters for this fight and everything else.

00:06:13.940 My dad was fighting as Jack Leonard because all of the cool fighters in the early 20s were Jewish.

00:06:21.000 And he faced a young guy from Mexico who he later learned had had something like 200 fights in Mexico.

00:06:32.380 He said, he said, I never saw so many gloves in my life.

00:06:37.220 But they got their gas money and were able to, you know, continue on.

00:06:43.820 After one of his stints working in the mines, he heads to California.

00:06:48.500 What does he do at this point?

00:06:51.120 Yeah, he went out to California and he met some people.

00:06:56.300 He made some connections through boxing with some people who were in the movie business.

00:07:01.340 And he kind of got to know some of those people as a, you know, a wannabe or up and coming boxer.

00:07:09.000 But he really wanted to go to sea.

00:07:10.680 So went down to San Pedro, signed up to get aboard a ship, but it was in the middle of a time.

00:07:18.180 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.

00:07:29.320 I think he said there was something like 400 seamen ahead of him on the list.

00:07:34.740 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.

00:07:47.320 And just accidentally got a ship to the Far East.

00:07:52.600 And it was a ship that nobody really wanted to sign onto.

00:07:57.000 It was kind of a crummy ship, but he went all the way around the world, Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaya, Egypt, Arabia, and got off of it in New York.

00:08:08.220 Spent some time in New York and then got on another ship headed for Los Angeles, you know, down the coast through the canal and to Los Angeles.

00:08:19.060 That was a tanker. 0.98

00:08:21.420 And all these experiences that he had, you know, riding the rails, the mine work, going out to sea, this showed up later in his writing.

00:08:28.140 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.

00:08:36.780 Yeah.

00:08:37.140 He was just trying to, just trying to work.

00:08:39.880 Yeah.

00:08:40.120 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.

00:08:49.060 And, you know, 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.

00:08:58.880 As I read about this part of your dad's life when he was a teenager in his early 20s, it reminded me a lot of Jack London.

00:09:06.440 Like Jack London rode the rails.

00:09:09.160 He was a boxer.

00:09:10.580 He went off to sea.

00:09:11.780 He was the sea wolf.

00:09:13.000 Was your father a fan of Jack London?

00:09:15.320 He was very much.

00:09:16.200 Do you think he was like purposely trying to follow the steps of the sea wolf or it was just like, that's just what boys did back then?

00:09:22.900 No, I think, I think there may have been a, I mean, there was certainly a lot of other romantic literature that dealt with going to sea.

00:09:31.800 It was also, you know, the only way that you could possibly see the world.

00:09:37.740 I mean, number one, no air travel.

00:09:39.780 Number two, in my dad's case, no money.

00:09:42.580 So you had to do it as a worker.

00:09:45.000 That was a way of working your way to foreign places.

00:09:51.120 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.

00:09:59.920 And certainly if anybody traveled farther than that on vacation, they were, you know, amongst the one-tenth of one percent of the wealthiest people in the country.

00:10:12.020 Right.

00:10:12.540 So, I mean, not only because it was expensive, but because it took a lot of time.

00:10:16.700 L.A. to Yokohama, the first leg of my dad's journey west from San Pedro was, I think, 22 days.

00:10:26.940 Travel was just very slow.

00:10:28.940 And, I mean, a liner would probably do it, a passenger liner would probably do it in five, but even so, maybe five, maybe seven.

00:10:35.220 So it was, you know, it was a different time.

00:10:38.160 But I think, you know, he did have a vision of wanting to do certain things, but more of it was financial.

00:10:44.800 He wasn't really looking for adventure.

00:10:47.640 Just on the Jack London front, London wrote an essay.

00:10:51.520 You couldn't really call it a short story, but he wrote a piece on riding the rails called Holding Her Down.

00:10:57.920 And it is one of the best examples of the kind of work you had.

00:11:05.500 You didn't just, like, jump on a boxcar and go someplace.

00:11:08.880 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 going to depart.

00:11:21.560 Because if you were on the train while it was stopped, the train crew would throw you off.

00:11:25.700 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.

00:11:35.880 And so it was quite a physical adventure.

00:11:40.400 It wasn't like, and I don't know if you've ever tried this, but you don't sleep in a boxcar while the train's moving.

00:11:47.500 The ride is horrific.

00:11:49.220 You will beat yourself to a concussion if you do that.

00:11:52.560 It's sort of boxcars ride very, very hard.

00:11:55.740 And, you know, you want to be in them with your knees broken a little bit.

00:12:00.840 And, you know, you're just like, it's almost like riding a horse in some cases.

00:12:04.640 So it's a very physically demanding way of travel.

00:12:10.400 Yeah, for sure.

00:12:11.160 So after your dad's that one stand at sea, he comes back.

00:12:14.680 And then in his early 30s, he served in World War II.

00:12:17.680 That is correct.

00:12:18.280 That's pretty old for a serviceman.

00:12:20.040 Were they calling him, like, Grandpa?

00:12:21.540 Yeah, well, they were calling him.

00:12:24.240 So 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, you know, not like full-time professional experience in the merchant marine.

00:12:40.480 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.

00:12:53.320 But he wanted to be an officer, and the Navy wasn't accepting officers who didn't have any college.

00:12:59.840 And so he backed off of that.

00:13:02.860 The first draft call-up came, and it included, gosh, everybody under a certain age.

00:13:09.700 I don't know what it was, but he was definitely in that category.

00:13:12.040 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.

00:13:20.700 So he didn't have good teeth, and they didn't want to spend the money fixing soldiers' teeth in those days.

00:13:26.180 And they thought he did have kind of an enlarged heart because he'd been an athlete.

00:13:32.140 He'd been a prize fighter.

00:13:33.860 And he was drinking a lot of coffee, so I think his pulse was very fast.

00:13:37.900 And they were sort of like, oh, you know, you're at death's door.

00:13:40.880 You're going to have heart problems.

00:13:42.540 You know, go home and deal with it.

00:13:44.120 And he went and saw another doctor, and the doctor said, you're a boxer, right?

00:13:48.200 Yes.

00:13:49.080 You drink a lot of coffee?

00:13:50.740 An awful lot of coffee.

00:13:52.680 Well, he's like, stop it with the coffee, and you'll be fine.

00:13:56.740 And so then Pearl Harbor happened, and everybody was called back, anybody that hadn't been taken.

00:14:03.140 And at that point, all you had to do was have a pulse.

00:14:05.260 You know, they didn't care.

00:14:06.440 And so he went, he was drafted into the Army.

00:14:10.960 He went in as an officer candidate to the tank destroyers.

00:14:15.680 So he was an officer's candidate school for the tank destroyers, which was kind of a special warfare outfit.

00:14:23.340 They were definitely the prestige, you know, armor outfit in the U.S. Army.

00:14:28.460 He got a very, very good education.

00:14:30.340 They had lots of map reading, lots of artillery training, lots of stuff that was pretty sophisticated.

00:14:39.260 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.

00:14:54.300 And a lot of it came from his artillery and tank destroyer training.

00:14:58.500 So while he was in the tank destroyers, he turned 34.

00:15:02.860 There was a cutoff that they established later on after he had, you know, this was very early in the war, and all these different rules were being figured out.

00:15:12.320 You know, they didn't quite know what age they wanted different people.

00:15:15.260 But anyway, by the time he graduated from tank destroyer school, they didn't want combat soldiers who were over 34.

00:15:22.700 So they sent him on.

00:15:24.260 He went into the Transportation Corps.

00:15:26.860 And in the Transportation Corps, I think the first thing he did was he went up to the upper peninsula of Michigan in the winter to test winter gear.

00:15:35.540 They thought he was equipped for that because he was from North Dakota.

00:15:38.780 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.

00:15:47.000 So he spent a lot of that time in Milwaukee and Chicago.

00:15:50.500 And then I 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.

00:16:01.160 That lasted a really short period of time.

00:16:03.800 He was hanging around the office late one Friday, and an order came in for a bunch of officers.

00:16:10.060 And they just said, you, you, you, you.

00:16:12.240 He was one of them.

00:16:13.300 Get on this train.

00:16:14.720 And they put him on this train.

00:16:16.400 And I don't think anybody had any idea what they were doing.

00:16:19.520 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.

00:16:27.780 And it was just collecting soldiers the whole way.

00:16:31.000 Very secretive.

00:16:31.780 Well, these were the, like the last wave of guys that were going to go over for the invasion of Normandy.

00:16:37.800 And so he got to England and during the invasion, he was a, like a traffic control officer putting stuff on ships in England.

00:16:50.240 That sounds kind of passe, but wow, I went over and looked at the area where they did this.

00:16:56.300 They would have the ships at 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.

00:17:10.100 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.

00:17:19.500 It was an incredible job.

00:17:21.820 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.

00:17:30.120 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.

00:17:39.220 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.

00:17:48.440 And then also he was just talking to people and getting stories from the people he talked to.

00:17:53.160 And 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.

00:18:04.700 He was a prodigious reader and this, he accounts all the stuff that he reads and education of a wandering man.

00:18:09.880 I mean, in the back of the book, he has this, a list of bibliography of books and plays he read from 1930 to 1935.

00:18:16.540 And it's just, it's a ton.

00:18:18.620 Like I just, it's like pages and pages of stuff he read.

00:18:21.460 I mean, everything.

00:18:22.860 Okay.

00:18:23.140 Just kind of looking at it.

00:18:24.120 Frederick Nietzsche.

00:18:25.200 He read Ralph Waldo Emerson.

00:18:27.600 A lot of Eugene O'Neill.

00:18:29.400 He was reading Voltaire.

00:18:31.400 Let's see here.

00:18:32.380 Upton Sinclair.

00:18:33.220 He would just, he'd also read detective stories.

00:18:35.320 Like he, he was not, it seems like he wasn't very discriminatory on what he read.

00:18:39.840 He was just like, if I got something to read, I'm going to read it.

00:18:42.440 Yeah.

00:18:42.580 Well, some of it was what was available.

00:18:44.100 Some of it, if you look at a lot of the titles in the late 1930s, he had a job.

00:18:50.640 It wasn't much of a job.

00:18:51.540 It didn't really pay him very much, but he had a job reviewing books for a newspaper in Oklahoma.

00:18:57.340 And so he would just read whatever, you know, whatever they sent him and they let him keep the books.

00:19:01.800 So he really did it for that.

00:19:04.780 And so, yeah, he just, anything he could get his hands on.

00:19:07.180 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.

00:19:18.420 Wow.

00:19:19.580 Yeah.

00:19:20.260 That's like a bookstore.

00:19:21.400 That sounds like Larry McMurtry.

00:19:22.780 Like Larry McMurtry had that giant book collection that he turned into a bookstore.

00:19:25.700 Yeah, no, it was the only thing that my father was the least bit materialistic about.

00:19:31.940 He just loved his books and collecting books and having books on different subjects and very, very wide ranging subjects.

00:19:39.500 And incredible collection of weird periodicals too.

00:19:44.980 So all kinds of magazines on like strange aspects of science and nature and history and things like that.

00:19:51.640 Yeah, my favorite books that he would sometimes talk about were these like really obscure books about specific locations in the Southwest.

00:20:00.220 Like there's probably only a hundred printed, but he wanted to learn about the history of this particular area of New Mexico.

00:20:06.420 I like that style there.

00:20:08.220 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:09.120 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?

00:20:14.980 No, I'm going to say, look at, you know, what today people call like the great books, you know, they're, they're real classics, the Greeks, things like that.

00:20:23.940 Yes, for sure.

00:20:25.020 He was very interested in the development of science and philosophical thought in the Renaissance era.

00:20:32.200 And then, you know, in the 1930s, a lot of the people who were making the world at that time.

00:20:40.300 So, you know, he read Marx and Engels and all those, you know, it's like, think what you want about them.

00:20:45.420 But they were definitely the most, you know, very historically important writers.

00:20:51.640 And so, yeah, I don't know too many that I would say too many philosophically or something like that.

00:20:58.660 But he was definitely interested in everything he could get his hands on.

00:21:02.640 Yeah, and I think the big takeaway from that, his reading, is you don't need to go to school to get an education.

00:21:07.500 I think 10th grade was his last bit of education.

00:21:10.080 He didn't even finish the 10th grade.

00:21:11.160 Didn't even finish 10th grade.

00:21:12.200 But he, I mean, if you look at his reading, like he knew a lot and it enriched his life.

00:21:17.100 Again, your education doesn't end with schooling.

00:21:18.720 You can keep reading.

00:21:20.400 Like he kept reading till the day he died.

00:21:23.060 Absolutely.

00:21:24.000 Absolutely.

00:21:24.360 The, you know, 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.

00:21:35.620 Another one of, you know, I just mentioned Marx.

00:21:37.560 One of the interesting things about his life, especially in the 1930s, was at least you could get the commies to talk to you.

00:21:46.880 You know, it's sort of like you could throw around ideas with these people.

00:21:50.100 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, you know, kind of communist philosophy and things like that, where you couldn't find that other, other places.

00:22:03.700 And those people couldn't talk about anything else.

00:22:05.860 It's the only thing they'd really been educated in a lot of times.

00:22:09.000 And, you know, there were some subjects that came up like that history everywhere, but it was always local.

00:22:15.920 You know, you could always find somebody who would tell you about the local history.

00:22:20.020 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 them to tell you about when this area was settled or this thing happened or what their great grandfather did.

00:22:30.960 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.

00:22:43.540 It's just, you know, whatever he had the opportunity to read, he had the opportunity to read.

00:22:48.300 Yeah.

00:22:48.340 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.

00:22:55.520 I mean, that's, that's impressive.

00:22:58.460 We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

00:23:00.960 And now back to the show.

00:23:05.280 So when did your dad decide to become a professional writer and like, what was his first work like?

00:23:12.960 Well, he had worked as a sports writer in Prescott.

00:23:17.880 He had written a couple of things when he was there.

00:23:20.520 He wrote a column on boxing for a newspaper in Oregon for a while.

00:23:27.780 I mean, these are, this is not impressive writing, even for sports.

00:23:32.100 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.

00:23:41.640 Later on, I'm going to guess he got back together with his parents and they all moved to Oklahoma.

00:23:47.600 They moved into a little farm that his oldest brother owned and he lived there with them throughout, throughout the 1930s.

00:23:55.880 And I think once they stopped in a particular place, he really had to do something with his life.

00:24:02.840 He was getting older and he was, you know, in the house with his dad, who was always a really hardworking guy.

00:24:09.560 And he needed to do something and he didn't have any skills.

00:24:13.540 He didn't have any other skills.

00:24:15.380 And so he had been writing poetry for a while.

00:24:18.800 I mean, to a certain, so the thing about poetry is because the meter and the rhyme are like mnemonics.

00:24:26.480 If you've got a mind like my dad, you can write it without any paper.

00:24:31.300 You know, the meter and rhyme help you remember what you're doing.

00:24:34.060 And so he had been doing that.

00:24:37.820 I think he started lecturing on his travels and things of that sort.

00:24:43.140 And he wanted to, you know, he wanted to be someone.

00:24:46.340 And I think at first he more wanted to be someone than he wanted to be a writer.

00:24:50.440 But then he realized he had to kind of sit down and do it.

00:24:52.940 And he wrote a series of stories that now exist in the book Yandering.

00:24:58.940 And the novel, No Traveler Returns.

00:25:02.300 This is, I kind of jokingly call this Louis 1.0.

00:25:05.520 This was the first version that he had of his life as a writer.

00:25:10.500 And they were adventure stories, but they were personal and they were realistic.

00:25:14.280 They weren't overly romanticized or melodramatic.

00:25:18.100 And he got pretty good notices for them.

00:25:20.400 He got good reviews.

00:25:21.780 He was in good magazines.

00:25:23.820 But the type of magazines he was in were so good, they didn't pay anything.

00:25:28.900 They were like literary journals and things like that.

00:25:31.100 And that wasn't going to cut it.

00:25:34.080 And so eventually he started writing more melodramatic stuff for the Pulps.

00:25:40.620 Now, maybe I should kind of talk about the magazine market, like what the Pulps really were.

00:25:45.220 Yeah, let's talk about the Pulps.

00:25:46.020 Because like a lot of, I mean, a lot of famous writers that we know about today,

00:25:49.160 like they got their start in the Pulps.

00:25:51.080 Dashiell Hammett, you know, all these guys.

00:25:53.520 So tell us about the Pulp business.

00:25:54.800 And how did the Pulp magazine business kind of craft or shape your dad as a writer?

00:25:59.040 Okay, so first off, kind of the business of it.

00:26:02.700 There were really three different types of magazines that were published in the early 20th century,

00:26:08.720 even the late 19th century.

00:26:10.660 They were what they called the literary magazines, which is what my dad had been publishing in.

00:26:14.760 And those were magazines that came out of college campuses and various literary,

00:26:21.580 there were some of them were literary journals, things like this.

00:26:24.200 They didn't pay anything, but they often had very good writing.

00:26:26.640 Then there were the Slick magazines.

00:26:28.720 They're called Slick because the paper was shiny and slick, so it could take colored advertisements.

00:26:35.620 And those magazines generally published fiction, but kind of a minimum of it.

00:26:42.340 And they paid very, very well, but they would take forever to figure out what story they wanted to have in what magazine.

00:26:51.320 They always wanted a very artful collection of stories in each magazine.

00:26:56.240 And they only paid when they actually published.

00:27:00.180 So they could take your story, mess around with what edition it was going to go in,

00:27:04.840 what month it was going to appear, and keep your story for months and months and months and months without ever paying you.

00:27:10.540 And then there were the Pulps, and the Pulps were pure fiction.

00:27:13.760 They were published on pulp paper, like newsprint.

00:27:17.880 And it didn't last particularly long.

00:27:20.220 It was only good for black and white ads, so these magazines were less expensive.

00:27:24.360 But the pulp magazines paid when they accepted your story.

00:27:28.840 So as soon as they said, yes, we want this, you got a check.

00:27:31.260 And that was something that was the saving grace for the Pulps in many a writer's life,

00:27:38.820 because nobody wanted to lose a story for six months while Collier's figured out which month they wanted to put it in.

00:27:45.700 And the Pulps weren't incredibly demanding editorially.

00:27:50.520 You could be a writer of modest skill and still get published.

00:27:55.600 They were very, very much a volume operation.

00:27:58.440 There were hundreds of magazines on hundreds of subjects, and each one published quite a few short stories.

00:28:05.280 And some of them published short stories and novels at the same time.

00:28:08.980 And so they were a place where a writer could make a living and get better.

00:28:15.960 All you had to do is be able to write fast, because they didn't pay very well.

00:28:19.920 And so in my dad's case, you know, they really taught him to write quickly

00:28:24.700 and to write in a very, very entertaining manner.

00:28:29.780 They were into the blood and guts.

00:28:31.580 They were into the plot moving quickly.

00:28:34.180 You know, in his case, he wrote a lot of short stories.

00:28:35.960 So the material was relatively, you know, 10 to 20 pages.

00:28:40.260 And it was a terrific training ground,

00:28:42.900 because he could train himself and survive at the same time and get better.

00:28:48.400 In today's world, you know, we've got a lot of winner-take-all industries.

00:28:54.040 You can come in as a genius and do really well,

00:28:57.100 but there aren't too many places where you can kind of develop your talent and still make a living.

00:29:01.660 It's very rare these days, especially in the entertainment arts.

00:29:05.860 Yeah, there's like no place to be like a middle-class writer.

00:29:08.280 It's harder to do that.

00:29:09.700 It's very hard to do that.

00:29:11.020 You know, I mean, the music business is one place,

00:29:13.100 because, you know, you can play bars until you get good.

00:29:14.980 But there's nothing like that for a writer.

00:29:18.860 And so it was a wonderful opportunity.

00:29:21.740 Most important for my dad was it trained him to write directly from his unconscious.

00:29:28.700 Instead of sitting there going, okay, what am I going to do now?

00:29:32.140 He was able to kind of open the doors to his unconscious and just write what showed up.

00:29:37.740 And this does not come easily.

00:29:39.880 It's not something that's normal.

00:29:41.120 The thing that I've always thought it was most like was improv comedy,

00:29:47.420 where you just, if you can kind of learn to open your mind and free associate from one thing to another,

00:29:54.380 once you get pretty good at doing it, good stuff comes out.

00:29:58.180 But very important for my dad, very important for his later work ethic.

00:30:02.020 You do not want to stop, because when that conduit to your unconscious gives itself an opportunity to close,

00:30:10.240 there's something about it that wants to stay closed.

00:30:13.740 And so I've experienced this in my life, because I tend to work on a creative project that,

00:30:20.360 or work on a project where it's very creative,

00:30:22.260 but then I go off and do all kinds of technical details that have to do it.

00:30:26.800 And that technical detail period really kind of allows me to close down creatively.

00:30:34.260 And it's very, very hard to get started again for the next one.

00:30:38.100 So the pulps helped him to be productive.

00:30:39.940 Because he ate what he killed, basically.

00:30:44.340 That's exactly right.

00:30:45.640 He had to sell a story at least once.

00:30:48.200 That was sell a story, not just finish a story.

00:30:49.940 It was like sell a story every week to get paid.

00:30:54.080 So what was his workday like?

00:30:55.660 Was he up from 8 o'clock in the morning and then just writing until 8 o'clock at night?

00:31:00.180 What was a typical workday like for your dad?

00:31:02.380 More like 5.30 in the morning.

00:31:04.140 Wow.

00:31:04.440 So up very early, butt in chair, sit at the typewriter, work until the kids are ready to have breakfast,

00:31:13.220 go into the next room, have breakfast with the kids.

00:31:15.680 He would read to us every morning.

00:31:17.620 A lot of times it was stuff he was interested in.

00:31:20.360 Sometimes it was stuff we were interested in.

00:31:22.520 But when we were little kids, he read to us every morning.

00:31:25.660 And then when we went to school, he was back at work, work until lunch, lunch, back at work for an hour or two.

00:31:34.420 Then he generally took an hour or two off to exercise and clean up from that.

00:31:41.080 Dinner after dinner, he often worked another hour or two.

00:31:44.160 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.

00:31:54.660 Yeah.

00:31:54.820 Or you said that if he needed to do some research, he would travel then maybe to maybe go.

00:31:59.180 Yes, but he'd still work.

00:32:00.580 Yeah, he'd still work.

00:32:01.220 He'd take a typewriter with him and he'd still work.

00:32:03.560 All right, so just a really strong work ethic.

00:32:06.820 Did he enjoy it?

00:32:08.000 Did he have to struggle and was just this tortured writer?

00:32:12.380 Or did he genuinely love being there on the typewriter, just click clacking away, cranking out a story?

00:32:18.740 He loved it.

00:32:19.740 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.

00:32:33.560 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.

00:32:44.100 You know, so the tortured thing was not something that got him anywhere, that he was really, you know, that really was doing him any favors.

00:32:51.020 And he wasn't tortured.

00:32:52.140 He was just very, very, he was thrilled to be doing it.

00:32:55.360 And, you know, another important thing about how he worked, I mean, actually what he put on the page, dad wrote in a very abbreviated style.

00:33:06.300 And in many cases, the details were very sketchy.

00:33:10.380 And what this does was it's just enough to inspire the reader's imagination.

00:33:17.480 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.

00:33:33.920 And that's really what makes a lot of that writing so wonderful.

00:33:38.540 You won't hear too many people in the kind of more literary side of the business talking about this.

00:33:44.280 In fact, you know, kind of more literate writing tends to write down absolutely every single thing, but that's not really a way to engage an audience.

00:33:52.180 You really engage an audience by giving them just enough.

00:33:54.980 It's a trick.

00:33:56.080 You know, you got to be able to give them just enough without giving them too little, but it creates a wonderful reading experience.

00:34:03.120 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.

00:34:09.520 I think he did a few boxing stories.

00:34:11.460 When did he become known as a Western writer?

00:34:15.140 How did he become the Western author that we know him today as?

00:34:19.060 Yeah.

00:34:19.400 So Westerns had been a part of the pulp magazine market since the 1880s.

00:34:24.640 I mean, really since the dime novels, but not huge.

00:34:28.820 And what happened, especially related to my dad, who had written a lot of adventure stories, kind of based on his travels or, you know, very melodramatically based on his travels.

00:34:39.420 Before World War II, nobody traveled internationally.

00:34:44.340 And exotic places were very interesting to people.

00:34:48.400 After World War II, while everybody had seen their children, their buddies die in exotic places, the adventure genre, you know, kind of created a certain amount of PTSD or something like this.

00:35:02.500 And people were recognizing it in the magazine businesses.

00:35:06.480 My dad was recognizing it to a certain extent, maybe unconsciously in his own world.

00:35:11.060 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.

00:35:24.080 But it was sort of safely in the past and it was at home.

00:35:28.400 And so he went to a, I think, New Year's Eve party, 1946.

00:35:33.540 He wasn't even out of the military yet with a publisher's party, a publisher that he knew very well.

00:35:40.220 And the guy told him, you know, he says, we think now Westerns and you know something about this.

00:35:47.480 You kind of grew up in that environment, you know, you should do this.

00:35:51.100 And so throughout the mid-40s, so 46, 47, he started transitioning to more and more Westerns.

00:35:59.660 By 48 or 49, he was going full bore, writing Western short stories for the Pulps.

00:36:06.980 In many cases, he was selling probably three or four years.

00:36:10.940 He sold 50 stories a year, which means he had to write like 60 or more to do that.

00:36:18.360 He's writing more than a story a week, going full out and just able to make do.

00:36:25.300 He could buy himself some nice clothes.

00:36:27.120 He had a tiny little, he had a little room in the back of somebody else's apartment.

00:36:30.700 He didn't have a car, wasn't going to be able to afford anything like that on what he was doing.

00:36:36.580 And then the pulp magazines, because of radio, because of television, because of the rise of the paperback, the pulp magazine started to collapse.

00:36:44.860 And he had a very difficult few years.

00:36:48.340 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.

00:37:00.700 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.

00:37:09.860 And he had kind of a sleazy agent who hadn't really been good for much.

00:37:14.020 And, you know, kind of in desperation, he sent it to that guy.

00:37:17.560 And that guy sold it to Collier's, which was a top market.

00:37:20.820 And he made a bunch of money.

00:37:22.180 I mean, I don't mean, it wasn't life-changing money, but it was, you know, it was four or five times what he would have made for a pulp story.

00:37:29.200 And that was placed in Collier's magazine.

00:37:32.600 And then it was optioned by John Wayne.

00:37:35.560 This became the movie Hondo.

00:37:37.280 And as soon as it was optioned, he took the option money.

00:37:40.120 Options like you rent a story for a while to see if you can get the pieces together to make a movie out of it.

00:37:45.440 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.

00:37:55.020 And he had some manuscripts he hadn't been able to sell, various things like this.

00:37:58.980 And he kind of stuck stuff in front of him and just said, I've got a movie coming out with John Wayne.

00:38:03.360 I've been writing Westerns.

00:38:05.080 I want to be your Western writer.

00:38:07.000 And just fired the full force of his personality onto them.

00:38:11.640 And he sold four books on that trip.

00:38:14.640 And that basically started him writing paperback original Westerns.

00:38:18.680 That was, like, 1954, 1953.

00:38:21.700 Yeah.

00:38:21.800 And at this time, I mean, he kind of hit the wave.

00:38:24.420 Like, America, that's what they wanted.

00:38:26.260 They wanted the Western.

00:38:27.380 And he was able to ride that wave.

00:38:29.860 Yeah.

00:38:30.260 Although I would say that he didn't really start distinguishing himself.

00:38:34.700 I think he wrote some – actually, some of the best writing that he wrote was in maybe the early 1960s.

00:38:40.600 But I don't know that he really necessarily distinguished himself from the pack.

00:38:45.280 What was interesting was, is as the Westerns started to decline a little bit, and he started writing more and more sort of different Westerns.

00:38:52.780 This would have been, again, towards the end of the 60s, early 70s, right before he really kind of exploded sales-wise.

00:38:59.300 That's when the material gets particularly interesting.

00:39:01.880 And he starts doing different things with it.

00:39:04.780 Why did it explode in the 70s, you think?

00:39:07.260 Well, first off, critical mass of backlist titles.

00:39:11.240 He just had so many titles in the marketplace.

00:39:13.940 None of them were going out of print.

00:39:15.520 All of them were making money all the time.

00:39:18.020 So that's the big one.

00:39:19.840 I think something that's important at this moment is that once he'd written 12, 15 Westerns, he kind of felt that he wanted to go back and write in other genres.

00:39:30.220 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.

00:39:36.600 They don't like you to change genres because the books are in the bookstore, you know, organized by genre.

00:39:43.340 And so when a writer starts writing in one particular genre, the publishers want him to stay there.

00:39:47.500 And dad didn't really want to stay there.

00:39:50.840 And he kept trying to break out.

00:39:52.520 He wrote some stories that had other, you know, in other genres.

00:39:56.720 It was actually The Walking Drum was written in 1960.

00:40:00.960 It wasn't published until the 80s.

00:40:02.920 But it was written in 1960.

00:40:04.940 That's set in like, you know, year 1200 Europe.

00:40:08.700 It's kind of a between the Crusades adventure story in Europe.

00:40:12.000 And he did some other stuff like that, trying to break out of it.

00:40:16.180 Last of the Breed, his kind of Cold War thriller, was conceived at that time.

00:40:21.960 It's kind of based on the Gary Powers U2 incident.

00:40:26.060 And, but, you know, nobody wanted this stuff.

00:40:29.460 So he went back to writing Westerns, but he decided he was going to change the Westerns.

00:40:33.840 He was going to write different kinds of Westerns.

00:40:35.500 So he would write Schalico, which was a Western about Europeans on safari in the West, something

00:40:41.700 that happened, but people don't really know about it too much.

00:40:44.940 He would write The Broken Gun, which was a contemporary Western.

00:40:47.760 It was set at the time, you know, late 1950s when it actually occurred.

00:40:51.800 But it was about a mystery set further back in the West in the 19th century.

00:40:56.420 And other stories, he did a little bit of science fiction-y kind of stuff with the Californios.

00:41:01.940 He started sort of changing it up.

00:41:03.300 And by the early 1970s, the audience for Westerns wasn't so brittle any longer.

00:41:10.120 And it was kind of open to different experiences, as a lot of things were in the 1970s.

00:41:15.980 And so he was able to do various different things.

00:41:20.640 All the backlist titles were doing very well.

00:41:23.620 The Centennial was coming up.

00:41:25.800 And he started writing stories about the early frontier, which kind of meshed with people's

00:41:32.540 interest in the Revolutionary War, because, you know, 1976 was the bicentennial of 1776.

00:41:40.300 And things all really came together right about that time.

00:41:44.560 Yeah.

00:41:45.040 Okay.

00:41:45.220 So he had this plan.

00:41:46.180 He didn't like being pigeonholed as a Western writer, but he had to figure out a way to transition

00:41:50.140 without upsetting, one, the audience, because they expect a certain type of thing.

00:41:53.800 And then, two, the publisher.

00:41:55.620 So he kind of played around the margins with the Western to do what he wanted.

00:41:59.480 Yeah.

00:41:59.860 Very correct.

00:42:00.680 I'm curious.

00:42:01.480 When you look at your dad's writing, the stories are very entertaining.

00:42:04.720 I love reading your dad's novels, the short stories.

00:42:07.140 But it seems like subtly there's like a message there.

00:42:09.580 Do you think your dad had a message that he was trying to convey with his stories, besides

00:42:14.200 just being entertaining?

00:42:16.160 Not consciously.

00:42:17.140 Honestly, I know sometimes when you read this stuff, you kind of go, really?

00:42:20.220 That was unconscious?

00:42:21.200 But God, he just wrote so fast.

00:42:23.660 And like I said, he kind of opened up his unconscious and just let it happen.

00:42:28.460 I mean, he had things that he cared about.

00:42:30.460 And if you look, if you're writing Westerns, there is no alternative.

00:42:36.180 Westerns are about the friction between civilization and the wilderness.

00:42:42.080 It's just a fundamental.

00:42:43.300 And so you get a big thematic thing just by saying, I'm writing a Western.

00:42:49.160 After that, you know, I'm sure you're quite aware of this.

00:42:53.140 There's this issue with families and kind of family connections and the solidity that

00:43:00.480 comes from having a good family that will help you out and things of that sort.

00:43:04.980 It's odd.

00:43:06.200 It's kind of ironic because my dad spent a lot of time, you know, not getting away from

00:43:11.000 his family, not getting away from it because he didn't like it, but just wanting to go

00:43:15.080 off by himself and explore and do different things.

00:43:19.620 And so there's this kind of interesting push-pull friction in his, you know, in his work where

00:43:26.300 a lot of his work is about the solidity of family.

00:43:28.540 And yet that wasn't necessarily what he was all about, especially earlier in his life.

00:43:32.720 He certainly was when I was a kid, but not earlier.

00:43:35.620 There's kind of an interesting theme about kind of adopted parents, you know, kind of

00:43:41.660 a older man will adopt a boy and raise that boy.

00:43:47.340 Now, orphans are a thing in literature.

00:43:49.840 I mean, this is all kind of Jungian stuff.

00:43:51.780 You know, there's a lot of orphans in mythology.

00:43:55.340 And so maybe he just clued into that unconsciously and was dealing with it.

00:43:59.100 But one further level to that, my mom and dad were kind of like surrogate parents for an

00:44:07.020 awful lot of my friends and my sister's friends.

00:44:10.860 I think, you know, we lived, we were growing up in the sixties and seventies and times were

00:44:15.660 kind of turbulent, especially in families.

00:44:17.540 And my family is very solid.

00:44:19.600 And it's interesting how my parents kind of became secondary parents to an awful lot of

00:44:26.320 our, our friends.

00:44:27.360 So you are overseeing your dad's legacy and you've worked to publish some of his unpublished

00:44:32.760 writing.

00:44:33.380 Can you tell us about some of the work you're doing with your dad's estate and his legacy?

00:44:37.940 Well, we've just about finished this, uh, Louis L'Amour's lost treasures series.

00:44:43.780 So Louis L'Amour's lost treasures is, it's kind of the story behind the story, or it's a bit

00:44:50.480 of a professional biography of my dad.

00:44:53.780 So I, I took about 30 of his previously published books and added a postscript, which talks about

00:45:03.080 different aspects of the book.

00:45:04.620 Sometimes I have alternative drafts of part of the book or correspondence that tells part

00:45:12.100 of the story of how it came to be.

00:45:13.920 Sometimes I'll do a postscript on how the movie was made or wasn't made because it failed.

00:45:20.900 A lot of things like that, you know, there's a series of stories where dad was working out

00:45:26.040 kind of editorial issues with Bantam books.

00:45:30.340 And you can see kind of the push pull between what they wanted in the book or what he wanted

00:45:35.200 to see in the book.

00:45:36.020 And so I kind of described those things.

00:45:39.020 There were a couple of stories that really kind of came out of a friendship that he had

00:45:44.920 with Catherine Hepburn and they never ended up working on a film together, but their, you

00:45:51.560 know, their discussion of what he wanted to do and what she wanted to do led certain stories

00:45:56.240 to be written.

00:45:56.800 So there's that.

00:45:58.680 And then there's also part of this series is two new books, Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures,

00:46:05.960 volume one and volume two.

00:46:07.920 And these are mostly beginnings of stories that dad never finished.

00:46:13.460 But a lot of times I will have, you know, he left behind an outline or he left behind notes

00:46:19.860 for what the story was going to be.

00:46:21.640 And so I'll give you the beginning of the story or whatever I've got of it.

00:46:25.200 And then I will, you know, give you the notes and explain what he was trying to do with the

00:46:31.020 story, what he was trying to do with his career, how I think the story would have ended.

00:46:34.980 There's a few finished short stories in that also.

00:46:38.440 And then last of all, there's a novel, No Traveler Returns, which is one of those early

00:46:44.400 yandering stories.

00:46:46.060 It was really dad's first novel, but he never really finished it.

00:46:50.160 He started it in 1937.

00:46:52.020 He worked on it on and off until he was drafted.

00:46:56.980 And it was kind of a pile of chapters and episodes that kind of hung together, just barely.

00:47:03.000 And so I went in and did a bunch of research to try and figure out what he was up to and how he

00:47:08.560 might have finished that.

00:47:09.680 And I rewrote that and we published that a few years ago.

00:47:14.060 So Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures, you don't have to read it in any particular order.

00:47:18.480 But the wonderful thing about it is that because the story is there, because you've read the

00:47:24.300 story, then what I have to say about the story is, you know, easily understandable.

00:47:28.700 If I was to try and write like the professional biography of Louis L'Amour in a book separate

00:47:33.580 from all this stuff, it would be very difficult because I'd have to describe each individual

00:47:37.180 story.

00:47:38.380 And so this is a, you know, I think we have one or two more of the postscripts to do and

00:47:43.740 maybe one more larger project in that.

00:47:46.540 And then it's on to something else.

00:47:49.460 Well, Beau, this has been a great conversation.

00:47:50.900 Where can people go to learn more about Louis L'Amour and your work?

00:47:54.640 LouisL'Amour.com.

00:47:55.640 L-O-U-I-S-L-A-M-O-U-R.com. 1.00

00:47:59.700 Fantastic.

00:48:00.220 Well, Beau L'Amour, thanks for your time.

00:48:01.200 It's been a pleasure.

00:48:02.280 Thank you very much.

00:48:03.220 Take care.

00:48:04.800 My guest today was Beau L'Amour.

00:48:05.920 He's the son of the author, Louis L'Amour, and he's also the manager of his estate.

00:48:09.820 You can find more information about Louis' work at LouisL'Amour.com.

00:48:12.820 Also, check out our show notes at AOM.IS slash L'Amour, where you find links to resources

00:48:17.160 where you delve deeper into this topic.

00:48:25.900 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.

00:48:28.720 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanly.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well

00:48:32.860 as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything

00:48:35.500 you think of.

00:48:36.580 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us

00:48:39.340 a review on the podcast or Spotify.

00:48:40.680 It helps that a lot.

00:48:41.360 And if you've done that already, thank you.

00:48:43.200 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member.

00:48:45.520 You would think there's something out of it.

00:48:47.060 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:48:48.820 Until next time, it's Brett McKay.

00:48:50.340 Remind your channel to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - September 23, 2024

The Life and Legacy of Louis L'Amour

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript