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 he ever penned was his own. And we re going to find out why.
00:02:14.360And then I think some people might have, you know, some of his work, his stories and novels,
00:02:18.060they got turned into TV shows and movies, correct?
00:02:21.160About 40 of them, if you include all the TV adaptations.
00:02:25.940Dad, he did a lot of business in early television in the, you know, 1950s and 60s.
00:02:32.500So 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.
00:02:44.660It was really one of the first television series that was ever produced.
00:02:47.740And one Western that people have probably seen, it's a John Wayne one, Hondo.
00:02:57.260When did you realize growing up that your dad was a famous bestselling author?
00:03:01.620He wasn't really famous when I was a kid.
00:03:04.060And 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.
00:03:16.140And so when I was a child, when I was a very young teenager, he was still kind of struggling.
00:03:22.880And I mean, we always lived comfortably, but he had to write three or four books a year to let us do that.
00:03:30.440And 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.
00:03:40.900And every time he had a new book come out, it boosted sales on everything in his backlist.
00:03:48.200And 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,
00:07:10.680So went down to San Pedro, signed up to get aboard a ship, but it was in the middle of a time.
00:07:18.180I 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.
00:07:29.320I think he said there was something like 400 seamen ahead of him on the list.
00:07:34.740And 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.
00:07:47.320And just accidentally got a ship to the Far East.
00:07:52.600And it was a ship that nobody really wanted to sign onto.
00:07:57.000It 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.
00:08:08.220Spent 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.
00:08:21.420And 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.
00:08:28.140Like 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.
00:08:40.120The 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.
00:08:49.060And, 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.
00:08:58.880As 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.
00:09:45.000That was a way of working your way to foreign places.
00:09:51.120And 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.
00:09:59.920And 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.
00:10:28.940And, I mean, a liner would probably do it, a passenger liner would probably do it in five, but even so, maybe five, maybe seven.
00:10:35.220So it was, you know, it was a different time.
00:10:38.160But I think, you know, he did have a vision of wanting to do certain things, but more of it was financial.
00:10:44.800He wasn't really looking for adventure.
00:10:47.640Just on the Jack London front, London wrote an essay.
00:10:51.520You couldn't really call it a short story, but he wrote a piece on riding the rails called Holding Her Down.
00:10:57.920And it is one of the best examples of the kind of work you had.
00:11:05.500You didn't just, like, jump on a boxcar and go someplace.
00:11:08.880It'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.
00:11:21.560Because if you were on the train while it was stopped, the train crew would throw you off.
00:11:25.700And 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.
00:11:35.880And so it was quite a physical adventure.
00:11:40.400It 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.
00:12:24.240So 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.
00:12:40.480But 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.
00:12:53.320But he wanted to be an officer, and the Navy wasn't accepting officers who didn't have any college.
00:14:30.340They had lots of map reading, lots of artillery training, lots of stuff that was pretty sophisticated.
00:14:39.260And 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.
00:14:54.300And a lot of it came from his artillery and tank destroyer training.
00:14:58.500So while he was in the tank destroyers, he turned 34.
00:15:02.860There 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.
00:15:12.320You know, they didn't quite know what age they wanted different people.
00:15:15.260But anyway, by the time he graduated from tank destroyer school, they didn't want combat soldiers who were over 34.
00:15:24.260He went into the Transportation Corps.
00:15:26.860And 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.
00:15:35.540They thought he was equipped for that because he was from North Dakota.
00:15:38.780Luckily 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.
00:15:47.000So he spent a lot of that time in Milwaukee and Chicago.
00:15:50.500And 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.
00:16:01.160That lasted a really short period of time.
00:16:03.800He was hanging around the office late one Friday, and an order came in for a bunch of officers.
00:16:10.060And they just said, you, you, you, you.
00:16:31.780Well, these were the, like the last wave of guys that were going to go over for the invasion of Normandy.
00:16:37.800And so he got to England and during the invasion, he was a, like a traffic control officer putting stuff on ships in England.
00:16:50.240That sounds kind of passe, but wow, I went over and looked at the area where they did this.
00:16:56.300They 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.
00:17:10.100And 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.
00:17:21.820They had vehicles backed up for dozens of miles and everything had to be perfect or the wrong stuff would arrive at the wrong time.
00:17:30.120And 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.
00:17:39.220Okay. 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.
00:17:48.440And then also he was just talking to people and getting stories from the people he talked to.
00:17:53.160And 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.
00:18:04.700He was a prodigious reader and this, he accounts all the stuff that he reads and education of a wandering man.
00:18:09.880I mean, in the back of the book, he has this, a list of bibliography of books and plays he read from 1930 to 1935.
00:19:04.780And so, yeah, he just, anything he could get his hands on.
00:19:07.180I 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.
00:20:09.120Do 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?
00:20:14.980No, 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.
00:21:24.360The, 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.
00:21:35.620Another one of, you know, I just mentioned Marx.
00:21:37.560One of the interesting things about his life, especially in the 1930s, was at least you could get the commies to talk to you.
00:21:46.880You know, it's sort of like you could throw around ideas with these people.
00:21:50.100And 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.
00:22:03.700And those people couldn't talk about anything else.
00:22:05.860It's the only thing they'd really been educated in a lot of times.
00:22:09.000And, you know, there were some subjects that came up like that history everywhere, but it was always local.
00:22:15.920You know, you could always find somebody who would tell you about the local history.
00:22:20.020You 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.
00:22:30.960And 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.
00:22:43.540It's just, you know, whatever he had the opportunity to read, he had the opportunity to read.
00:22:48.340So 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.
00:23:05.280So when did your dad decide to become a professional writer and like, what was his first work like?
00:23:12.960Well, he had worked as a sports writer in Prescott.
00:23:17.880He had written a couple of things when he was there.
00:23:20.520He wrote a column on boxing for a newspaper in Oregon for a while.
00:23:27.780I mean, these are, this is not impressive writing, even for sports.
00:23:32.100I 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.
00:23:41.640Later on, I'm going to guess he got back together with his parents and they all moved to Oklahoma.
00:23:47.600They moved into a little farm that his oldest brother owned and he lived there with them throughout, throughout the 1930s.
00:23:55.880And I think once they stopped in a particular place, he really had to do something with his life.
00:24:02.840He was getting older and he was, you know, in the house with his dad, who was always a really hardworking guy.
00:24:09.560And he needed to do something and he didn't have any skills.
00:31:17.620A lot of times it was stuff he was interested in.
00:31:20.360Sometimes it was stuff we were interested in.
00:31:22.520But when we were little kids, he read to us every morning.
00:31:25.660And then when we went to school, he was back at work, work until lunch, lunch, back at work for an hour or two.
00:31:34.420Then he generally took an hour or two off to exercise and clean up from that.
00:31:41.080Dinner after dinner, he often worked another hour or two.
00:31:44.160Seven 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.
00:32:19.740I 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.
00:32:33.560So I think the energy with which he wrote translates out to the reader in incredible energy and incredible happiness that he's doing this.
00:32:44.100You 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.
00:32:52.140He was just very, very, he was thrilled to be doing it.
00:32:55.360And, 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.
00:33:06.300And in many cases, the details were very sketchy.
00:33:10.380And what this does was it's just enough to inspire the reader's imagination.
00:33:17.480So 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.
00:33:33.920And that's really what makes a lot of that writing so wonderful.
00:33:38.540You won't hear too many people in the kind of more literary side of the business talking about this.
00:33:44.280In 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.
00:33:52.180You really engage an audience by giving them just enough.
00:33:56.080You know, you got to be able to give them just enough without giving them too little, but it creates a wonderful reading experience.
00:34:03.120So 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.
00:34:19.400So Westerns had been a part of the pulp magazine market since the 1880s.
00:34:24.640I mean, really since the dime novels, but not huge.
00:34:28.820And 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.
00:34:39.420Before World War II, nobody traveled internationally.
00:34:44.340And exotic places were very interesting to people.
00:34:48.400After 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.
00:35:02.500And people were recognizing it in the magazine businesses.
00:35:06.480My dad was recognizing it to a certain extent, maybe unconsciously in his own world.
00:35:11.060And 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.
00:35:24.080But it was sort of safely in the past and it was at home.
00:35:28.400And so he went to a, I think, New Year's Eve party, 1946.
00:35:33.540He wasn't even out of the military yet with a publisher's party, a publisher that he knew very well.
00:35:40.220And the guy told him, you know, he says, we think now Westerns and you know something about this.
00:35:47.480You kind of grew up in that environment, you know, you should do this.
00:35:51.100And so throughout the mid-40s, so 46, 47, he started transitioning to more and more Westerns.
00:35:59.660By 48 or 49, he was going full bore, writing Western short stories for the Pulps.
00:36:06.980In many cases, he was selling probably three or four years.
00:36:10.940He sold 50 stories a year, which means he had to write like 60 or more to do that.
00:36:18.360He's writing more than a story a week, going full out and just able to make do.
00:36:25.300He could buy himself some nice clothes.
00:36:27.120He had a tiny little, he had a little room in the back of somebody else's apartment.
00:36:30.700He didn't have a car, wasn't going to be able to afford anything like that on what he was doing.
00:36:36.580And then the pulp magazines, because of radio, because of television, because of the rise of the paperback, the pulp magazine started to collapse.
00:36:44.860And he had a very difficult few years.
00:36:48.340I 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.
00:37:00.700And 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.
00:37:09.860And he had kind of a sleazy agent who hadn't really been good for much.
00:37:14.020And, you know, kind of in desperation, he sent it to that guy.
00:37:17.560And that guy sold it to Collier's, which was a top market.
00:37:22.180I 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.
00:37:29.200And that was placed in Collier's magazine.
00:37:32.600And then it was optioned by John Wayne.
00:38:30.260Although I would say that he didn't really start distinguishing himself.
00:38:34.700I think he wrote some – actually, some of the best writing that he wrote was in maybe the early 1960s.
00:38:40.600But I don't know that he really necessarily distinguished himself from the pack.
00:38:45.280What was interesting was, is as the Westerns started to decline a little bit, and he started writing more and more sort of different Westerns.
00:38:52.780This would have been, again, towards the end of the 60s, early 70s, right before he really kind of exploded sales-wise.
00:38:59.300That's when the material gets particularly interesting.
00:39:01.880And he starts doing different things with it.
00:39:04.780Why did it explode in the 70s, you think?
00:39:07.260Well, first off, critical mass of backlist titles.
00:39:11.240He just had so many titles in the marketplace.
00:39:19.840I 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.
00:39:30.220Because 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.
00:39:36.600They don't like you to change genres because the books are in the bookstore, you know, organized by genre.
00:39:43.340And so when a writer starts writing in one particular genre, the publishers want him to stay there.
00:39:47.500And dad didn't really want to stay there.