Louis Dearborn L'Amour (/ˈluːi ləˈmʊər/; né LaMoore; March 22, 1908 – June 10, 1988) was an American novelist and short story writer.

L'Amour once said, "[Henty's works] enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn't have about wars and politics.

Over the next seven or eight years, they skinned cattle in west Texas, baled hay in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico, worked in the mines of Arizona, California and Nevada, and in the sawmills and lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest.

It was in colorful places like these that Louis met a wide variety of people, upon whom he later modeled the characters in his novels, many of them actual Old West personalities who had survived into the 1920s and 1930s.

Making his way as a mine assessment worker, professional boxer, and merchant seaman, Louis traveled the country and the world, sometimes with his family, sometimes not.

He visited all of the western states plus England, Japan, China, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, and Panama, finally moving with his parents to Choctaw, Oklahoma in the early 1930s.

[4] He had success with poetry, articles on boxing and writing and editing sections of the WPA Guide Book to Oklahoma, but the dozens of short stories he was churning out met with little acceptance.

L'Amour wrote only one story in the western genre prior to World War II, 1940's The Town No Guns Could Tame.

Only two issues of the Hopalong Cassidy Western Magazine were published, and the novels as written by L'Amour were extensively edited to meet Doubleday's thoughts of how the character should be portrayed in print.

The short story The Gift of Cochise was printed in Colliers (5 July 1952) and seen by John Wayne and Robert Fellows, who purchased the screen rights from L'Amour for $4,000.

[5][circular reference] Initially he wrote five books about William Tell Sackett and his close relatives; however, in later years the series spread to include other families and four centuries of North American history.

The first several shows were "transcriptions", literal breakdowns of the exact L'Amour short story into lines for the different characters and narrator.

The cast members were veterans of the New York stage, film and advertising worlds and came together for a rehearsal and then a day of recording the show.

Whenever the story material supported it a more contemporary style was used in the writing and more and more high tech solutions to the effects and mix found their way into the productions.

The techniques used by him and producer/editor Paul O'Dell were more in line with motion picture production, simply taping the voices of the actors in the studio and then recording the majority of sound effects in the field.

Several of the scripts from the L'Amour series have been produced as live theater pieces, including The One for the Mojave Kid and Merrano of the Dry Country.

Produced as sort of a "profitable hobby" Beau L'Amour and Paul O'Dell created the production while working around their day-to-day jobs.

His Western fiction is strictly formulary and frequently, although not always, features the ranch romance plot where the hero and the heroine are to marry at the end once the villains have been defeated.

L'Amour, a non-smoker, died from lung cancer at his home in Los Angeles on June 10, 1988, and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

L'Amour often wrote series of novels and short stories featuring previously introduced characters, the most notable being the Sackett clan.

[21] There are also two Sackett-related short stories: Sacketts are also involved in the plot of 10 other novels: (Note: The Talon and Chantry series are often combined into one list for a total of eight)[22] [23] Originally published under the pseudonym "Tex Burns".

Louis L'Amour was commissioned to write four Hopalong Cassidy books in the spring and summer of 1950 by Doubleday's Double D Western imprint.

They were the first novels he ever had published and he denied writing them until the day he died, refusing to sign any of them that fans would occasionally bring to his autograph sessions.