Wild West Comes Alive With L'Amour

Good morning. It’s March 22. On this date in 1906, one of the most prolific and best-selling authors in history was born in Jamestown, N.D. Louis L’Amour was a favorite writer of American presidents, and his prose inspired one of the best lines in Paul Ryan’s speech at the 2012 GOP convention.

I don’t know if Barack Obama reads westerns, but Dwight Eisenhower would give Louis L’Amour novels to his Secret Service agents after reading them, and former President Jimmy Carter was reading the L’Amour saga “The Lonesome Gods” when the author succumbed to cancer in 1988.

Ronald Reagan, who read “Jubal Sackett” while recovering from cancer surgery as president, presented the author with two different medals, a Congressional Gold Medal in 1983 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.

The first of these two ceremonies took place on the South Lawn at a White House barbeque for the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association. The congressional medal was an honor so rare for a writer that only Robert Frost had previously received it.

“The men and women of the Old West may not have been as slick as they were sometimes portrayed by Hollywood,” said the old Hollywood actor, “but there was a certain integrity of character that shines through as we look back at them from the vantage place of history.”

Reagan lauded L’Amour as a prolific storyteller whose 87 books, most of them set in the West, had sold some 140 million copies (the total is much higher today) and been adapted for movies and television shows. “He brought the West to the people of the East and to people everywhere,” the president said.

But Reagan couldn’t see where L’Amour was sitting and when he asked the author to come forward, the president turned in the wrong direction. When he spotted L’Amour behind him, Reagan ad-libbed, “You sneaked up on me, just like Bowdrie.” This was a reference to Chick Bowdrie, a Texas Ranger who sprung from L’Amour’s ample imagination.

Such characters also emanated from Louis L’Amour’s rich life. He quit school at 15 – but never quit reading – and took to the railroads, ships, and byways of this country, working variously as a ranch hand, longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, fruit picker, seaman, and prizefighter. As a U.S. Army lieutenant in World War II, he commanded a platoon of trucks supplying gasoline to planes and tanks in France and Germany, work even more perilous than the challenges faced by the white hats in his novels.

Throughout it all, L’Amour always planned to become a writer; and, as the New York Times noted in its respectful obituary, he was confident of his literary abilities. “I could sit in the middle of Sunset Boulevard,” he once quipped, “and write with my typewriter on my knees.”

He’d sold a few short stories before the war, mostly mysteries and adventure tales. Afterwards, he picked up his pace and turned to westerns, hitting it big with a short story called “The Gift of Cochise.”

Published by Colliers magazine in the summer of 1952, “Cochise” was read and loved by John Wayne, who bought the rights to it. The screenwriters fleshed out the story, and renamed it “Hondo.” L’Amour was encouraged to write a novel-length book by the same name. Its publication was timed with the movie’s release the following year, and a franchise had been launched.

The speed with which he produced his books baffled his own publishers, who strained to keep up with him, and even piqued the curiosity of his own family. One day, L’Amour later recalled, as he was “speeding along at the typewriter” his daughter Angelique, then a little girl, asked, “Daddy, why are you writing so fast?”

“Because,” he responded, “I want to see how the story turns out!”

Good fiction depends on such a quality among the readers – call it willful suspension of disbelief – but here was the author himself acknowledging that his story lines and his characters had minds of their own.

Despite his vast success – or, perhaps in part because of it -- Louis L’Amour was underrated as a wordsmith. This perception was brought home last summer when Paul Ryan said in his speech at the Republican convention in Tampa that the Obama administration was “like a ship trying to sail on yesterday’s wind.”

To some Louis L’Amour aficionados this sounded familiar – and it was. Ryan’s communications staff acknowledged that the line was inspired by the observation of an imaginary 12th century pirate named Red Mark, who in L’Amour’s telling observes: “A ship does not sail with yesterday’s wind.”

Perhaps, as Americans await a fiscal plan from Washington that is rooted in reality, that is a lesson to be contemplated by both political parties.