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left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including
seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, assessment
miner, and officer on tank destroyers during World War II. During his
"yondering" days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on
the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in theMojave
Desert . He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and
worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector
of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the time I could talk." After
developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories
written for fiction magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first full-length
novel,Hondo , in theUnited States in 1953. Every one of his more than 100
books is in print; there are nearly 230 million copies of his books in print
worldwide, making him one of the best-selling authors in modern literary
history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than
forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and
television movies.
His hardcover bestsellers includeThe Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his
twelfth-century historical novel)Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed , andThe
Haunted Mesa . His memoir,Education of a Wandering Man , was a leading
bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L'Amour
stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio Publishing.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L'Amour became the
first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United
States Congress in honor of his life's work. In 1984 he was also awarded the
Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.
Louis L'Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children,
Beau and Angelique, carry the L'Amour tradition forward with new books written
by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the
nineties among them, four Hopalong Cassidy novels:The Rustlers of West Fork,
The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, andTrouble Shooter .
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