The son of an immigrant, Stan Steiner attended high school at the former Dutch Reform School in Flatbush, founded in 1637. "I didn't attend school much," he said. In fact, I was finally expelled because I got such high marks on examinations that the assistant principal insisted that I must have been cheating."
Steiner was ambivalent about school and called himself "a good scholar, but not a school scholar." During high school, he was a rare combination of football jock and intellectual, and remembered stopping at a book sale on his way home from football practice. The books were were selling for seventeen cents a pound, and he brought several before discovering they were the poetry of Shelly and Keats.
"I was elevated and exhilarated by them," he said. "And that created a problem that dogged me for a year. I couldn't tell my buddies on the football team that I was reading poetry. And it was a tussle between football and Shelley and Keats." The poets won eventually and he vividly recalled hanging up his green jersey with number 52 on its back for the last time, "much to the relief of my mother who was afraid that I would become a professional football player."
His father wanted him to take over his furniture manufacturing business but Steiner insisted she was going to write; his first novel had already been completed when he was twelve. "I decided that Huckleberry Finn was out of date, so I began writing an urban version. I was writing it at my desk when my grandmother came in to the room and took a look, saying, 'That's not homework,' and she tore it up. It was my first rejection."
The Spur Award winner first sold his work to the Saturday Review when he was 19. The book of poetry was researched by hitchhiking and riding freight trains across the country with a friend following high school graduation. "I wasn't bumming my way," he said. "I worked on cross country trucks and did almost anything to help get from one town to another." The result of his travels was his America, America, America, a love ballad.
Steiner worked at various jobs following graduation from the University of Wisconsin, including several yeas in his father's furniture factory, in printing shops and the New York Daily News in the production department. "But mostly, I didn't work to support my writing. My first wife worked to support my writing, and I had a pretty easy early success in the literary scene. But after a few years, I decided it was a farce, because I didn't know anything about life, so I quit the literary scene and spent ten years writing four books for myself--novels while working with longshoremen on the New York waterfront for seven or eight years. And I figured out in those ten years that I earned eight-two dollars for my writing, which came to about thirteen cents a week.
"In my young, idealistic, and pre-family days, I believed, as many young writers do that a writer must earn a living to write, but he must never write to earn a living. Of course, that was a long time ago. Nowadays, the only people who believe that are editors and publishers. Writers have gotten over that romanticism."
Steiner would sit before his well-worn Olympic manual typewriter for at least eight hours a day. often longer, until his untimely death in 1987. He once spent a marathon 72 hours without sleep while rewriting a television documentary script. "I think you have to write whenever you have to write. And that depends entirely on the individual, and the kind of writing he or she is doing So my schedule is dictated by that.
Vanishing White Man won him a Spur and took him two years to write. But he carried the story in his head for forty years before he began. "I'm a visual writer," he said. "I have to experience the people and the place before I can write about either. If I'm going to write about a rancher, I have to go visit his ranch to see what his operation is like, what his family is like, and the terrain. I have to see it, feel it, and become part of it.
"What I don't like about writing is getting published. If you could only be paid to write--earn a living at it and not worry about getting published, all these hypothetical things with editors and publishers, horrendous things with circulation and marketing could be avoided."
The feisty, husky-voiced author said few pleasures surpassed the enjoyment of his craft. "Maybe seeing the mountains gives me more pleasure than writing, or eating a good meal, or making love. But I do enjoy writing. It is a constant discovery of the world, and a discovery of myself."
When asked why he wrote, Steiner used the analogy of an aging rancher he interviewed near Stinking Springs, Oregon. Asked why he still ranched , "he looked me in the eye and said, 'Why do you write? It must be a force of habit.' When I asked him how he managed at the age of 75 to keep up with several thousand acres and a couple of hundred head of cattle, he said, 'My fatter always used to say to be a buckaroos, you had to be a little smarter than a cow.' Maybe that applies to writing somehow."
Steiner insisted that everything written in the West by a western writer is a western, regardless of subject matter. "Even though it's not a shoot-em up, or has nothing to do with cowboys and cows, and is miles from a bunkhouse or a corral, it's still a western because you can't live in the West and not be affected by it. I can't sit here and look out my window and see the Sangre deCristo Mountains and not be influenced by them."
Library research was always secondary in Steiner's more than 20 novels and nonfiction books. Traveling the area and interviewing people was all-important to his work. While writing Laruza, he completed 500 pages of text about New Mexico's small farming towns and villages, based on the work of sociologists and historians.
"Some of them were my friends, of whom were damned good but when I finished the five hundred pages, I thought, This is not the way the local people in those villages talk about their lives. There's something too esoteric and removed. "So I tore up the five hundred pages and threw them in the wastepaper basket, and began rewriting it over, basing it with the small farmer in the valley and his life, the way I had known his life to be for two or three decades. That's research for me. And when I finished the chapter and I gave it to him to read, he said, 'Stan, you got me just right. I'll give you an acre of land.' Best interview I ever did."
(Excerpted from Maverick Writers)
Friday, February 24, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Remembering Stan Steiner
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| 1925-1987 |
To combat what he termed eastern indifference, Steiner and some twenty-five of his fellow New Mexico authors formed the Writers Cooperative of Santa Fe during the early eighties to sell their work any way they could. "Going out and doing it yourself is what it's all about," he said. "Stop complaining about what the publishers do or don't do--just do it yourself."
Santa Fe writers took their books directly to the public, readers in small villages as well as New Mexico's largest cities. They even built their own booths at the state fair in Albuquerque, where they hawked their wares like everyone else. The concept is not really new, the co-op's first president, said. "But fairs are a great untapped marketplace."
Encouragement and financial backing from both the Santa Fe Arts Council and New Mexico Humanities Council kept the co-op alive, and their projects received favorable responses from state officials and readers at large. With substantial grants the writers organized and carried out a number of projects, such as renting a book van to travel as far as remote mining villages in the northern mountains. The Small Town Book Van Project gave most rural residents their first glimpse of a professional writer.
During the process of selling their books, the Santa Fe Co-op members came to the attention of eastern publishers when they were written up in The New York Times. Steiner credited a New York writers' conference with making himself and fellow mavericks angry enough to establish the cooperative.
"The invitation said 'Norman Mailer and Gloria Steinem and a bunch of people invite you to this conference.' So I wrote back saying, "I think this is a good idea; writers ought to fight for their rights, especially in this sad state of publishing.' But I noticed that they had no Western writers listed--and Mailer and Steinem don't represent the writers of the West. Well, they got real excited and said I had to come to New York to represent Western writers, which was their first mistake. No one represents a Western writer, other than him or herself."
Steiner's reply to the request was that New York culture is very provincial, that the nation had shifted west, along with demagogic charts, population, economy and politics. "The population center is no longer in Manhattan, New York. It's in Manhattan, Kansas, and you have to go beyond the Hudson. So I went to New York, and they had this panel they had arranged for me. Outside the door the panel read: 'Beyond the Hudson, outside the center of gravity.'"
Steiner and a group of Santa Fe writers returned from the conference and mulled that one over for some time. "What do we do about it?" they asked themselves. After a while, they stopped talking, stopped complaining, and formed the Writers Co-op of Santa Fe. "It's not a writers' literary club," Seiner was quick to explain. "Nor is it a literary support group, or group therapy. It's a group of professional writers who are trying to develop ways of marketing and selling books that are particularly, uniquely, and ingeniously Western."
Steiner, himself, was not indigenously Western, but embraced the West with both arms, refusing to let go. He was born in Spottswood, New Jersey, and grew up in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn., with westward yearnings.
"My father came to America in 1905 from Vienna, Austria, and the first postcard he sent home was a picture of Custer's scalp, on which my father had painted a feather."
(Part II of Stan Steiner's interview will appear next week.)
Saturday, February 11, 2012
C. J. Box Revisited
Blue Heaven, C.J. Box's first stand-alone novel, won an Edgar Award for Best Novel of 2008 and has been optioned for film. Three Weeks to Say Goodbye was published in January 2009 and debuted on the NY Times extended bestseller list. His ninth Joe Pickett novel, Below Zero, released last year, became his biggest bestseller to date.
Chuck, how do you manage to write two novels a year? What’s your writing schedule like?
Two books a year is kind of a temporary predicament that came about because I've got two publishers: Putnam for the Joe Pickett series and St. Martins Press for the stand-alone novels. Each wants a book a year. It's worked out because the first stand-alone Blue Heaven was already written so, for me, it's been more like nine months between writing the books which is just about right for me.
I work every day with my best work in the mornings. I edit and do other things in the afternoons. When I'm at my cabin or an isolated place, I work in one or two more writing sessions and sometimes go deep into the night. My goal is always 1,000 good words a day, but sometimes I exceed that. And sometimes I fall short.
I know that you’re an avid hunter-fisherman. Were you in the Wyoming outback when you conceived your series characters, game warden Joe Pickett?
I was working as a newspaper reporter in Saratoga, Wyoming, when I first started working on the novel which would later become Open Season, the first Joe Pickett novel. I spent (and spend) a lot of time outdoors and while I was coming up with the premise I was doing ride-alongs with the local game warden for newspaper stories. As I learned more about the duties and responsibilities (and home life) of a game warden, I thought a game warden would be a great protagonist. I'm glad I chose correctly.
Would you rather be hunting or fishing than writing?
I'd rather be combining the three, to be honest. Do a productive session at the computer, grab my fly rod, and come back later to write a little more. That, for me, is the perfect day.
How does it feel to not only win an Edgar Award but to make the New York Times bestseller list?
It feels fantastic, because the Edgar is an honor bestowed on my fellow novelists for quality and being on the NYT list means readers are buying the books. I think all Edgar winners want to be best-selling authors, and all best-selling crime novelists want to win an Edgar. So I'm a lucky guy.
How did your novel, Below Zero, evolve? Tell us about the plot.
I'd heard about carbon offset companies over the years and was both fascinated and repulsed by the concept of, in effect, buying out ones guilt for producing a carbon footprint by paying money to one of the organizations. I researched the concept and built it into one of the primary storylines of the novel. In it, a dying mobster finds out the only way he can reconcile with his extreme environmentalist son is to try and bring his massive carbon footprint to "below zero" by the time he passes. Because he only has a few weeks to live, he has to commit large-scale crimes to make his balance drop.
At the same time, Joe Pickett's daughters start receiving text messages from a foster sister who they thought had died six years before. Investigation reveals the texts have originated from locations where major crimes have occurred. As Joe pursues this, the two storylines merge.
Which of your novels was the most difficult to write and do you have a favorite among them?
Blue Heaven was the most difficult because of the structure. The novel is told from six points of view within 60 hours in real time. Only the reader knows completely what's going on. Multiple points-of-view can get really, really tricky. If the reader doesn't think of the structure or difficulty, that means it worked. But getting there is tough.
I like all my novels for different reasons the way a parent likes his or her children. But if someone held a gun to my head and made me choose, I'd say Blue Heaven, Free Fire, Winterkill, and Open Season are my favorites.
What’s the best way to promote your books? Personal appearances or the Internet?
Books are still sold one at a time by people to other people. It's a very basic, low-tech business and it's driven by word-of-mouth. Getting out and meeting readers and potential readers is the best way to build a career, I think. Of course, if the books aren't good it doesn't matter either way.
Advice to budding western mystery novelists?
Read! It always amazes me when fledgling novelists don't read widely or often. More can be learned from reading than classes or courses. And if you choose to use the west as your location, please be authentic and stay away from western "characters" and hokum.
What makes a novel successful?
The reader must empathize with a character or several characters. And the novel should be structured so the reader wants to keep turning pages. There are so many entertainment options out there an author must realize the reader has choices, and one of the easiest choices of all is to put the book down if it isn't compelling.
Thanks for stopping by.
You can visit C.J. Box at his website: http://www.cjbox.net/
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Remembering Louis L'Amour
Louis Dearborn L'Amour (La Moore) was not only the West's best-selling storyteller, he was the consummate Western man, a pattern for the white-hatted heroes he wrote about. Hardworking and soft-spoken, he was proud of his accomplishments, yet despite rumors to the contrary, he was often shy in his remembrances. L'Amour literally elevated himself by his proverbial boot straps, and in the process, left footprints in the marketing landscape that few writers will be able to fill.
Luck had nothing to do with his success, he said not long before his death in 1988. "Nor have I had any connections or breaks that I did not create for myself. I just tried to write the best I could about things I knew."
There are realities that writers must consider, he was quick to add. "No publisher is going to do anything for you that you don't earn. They simply can't afford to. Once a writer proves he can make money, they will often extend themselves. There's no magic, just hard work."
The work ethic was instilled in L'Amour as a child by his parents in Jamestown, North Dakota. His father, a veterinarian and farm machinery salesman, was involved in local politics. He served as alderman of Jamestown's largest ward for many years as well as deputy sheriff, but he lost his mayoral race. "People in small towns doubled in brass, you might say."
Young Louie enjoyed playing cowboys and Indians, and roughhoused in the family barn, which doubled as his father's veterinary hospital. He did more than his share of reading, particularly G. A. Henty, an Englishman who wrote of wars through the nineteenth century. L'Amour said, "It enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn't have about wars and politics."
The L'Amour family library encompassed some five hundred books, among them the works of Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, and Poe, as well as popular American and English writers. The youngest of the L'Amour children, Louie remembered reading a five-volume Collier's History of the World while he was small enough to sit in his father's lap.
"I think all things you read influence your writing to some degree. And if you don't learn anything else, you learn something about living and the use of words."
His serious reading began at twelve with a collection of biographies titled The Genius of Solitude. "The only one I remember is Socrates, the first chapter, but I remember it well." A book of natural history followed, which he tried unsuccessfully to locate years later for his children. During adolescence, L'Amour immersed himself in books of chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and the history of aircraft.
His concentrated self-education resulted in boredom with school. "I was just spinning my wheels," he said, "so it was no real hardship for me to leave. I had to go to work to find myself a change." L'Amour left school and Jamestown at fifteen, after completing the tenth grade. Since crop failures were common in North Dakota, and his father's livelihood was linked to the farming community, he decided to find his niche elsewhere. By hitchhiking and riding the rails, he arrived in Oklahoma City to visit an older brother, who was the governor's secretary, but he soon moved on.
"By then I was broke and I got a job in West Texas skinning dead cattle that died from a prolonged drought. They had been dead a while. Some fellow was trying to save the hides and it was the most miserable job, but I learned a lot." The young man's boss was a seventy-nine-year-old wrangler raised by Apaches, who had ridden on war parties with Nana and Geronimo. "He was a very, very, hard old boy but I got along with him fine. He was the first to teach me about tracking and using herbs."
L'Amour left his odorous job, after three months sleeping on the ground and staying downwind from passersby. He had helped skin 965 head of cattle by staking their skulls and tying their hides to the bumper of an early model pickup truck.
His next job was baling hay in New Mexico's Pecos Valley, across the road from Billy the Kid's grave. He visited the Maxwell home where Billy had been killed, and talked to the woman who offered the outlaw his last meal. L'Amour remembered her as "a pretty sharp old lady who still had all her buttons." He then talked to Judge Cole in Ruidoso, and got to know some thirty former gunfighters, rangers, and outlaws in the area. He regretted not knowing about a number of others.
While wandering about the West, he joined a circus in Phoenix, leaving three weeks later in El Paso. He then hoboed his way to Galveston, Texas, where he hired on as a merchant seaman. His first cruise was to the West Indies, his second to the British Isles. He tried his hand at writing during his travels, but his scribblings didn't include events as familiar as his Western heritage.
L'Amour's family history is rich in frontier adventure. His maternal great-grandfather was scalped by the Sioux while a member of the Sibley Expedition, following the Little Crow Massacre in Minnesota. Both his grandfathers served in the Union army during the Civil War, and his maternal grandfather taught him military tactics by drawing battle plans on a blackboard.
The novelist was especially proud of his mother's ancestry, beginning with Godfrey Dearborn, who arrived in this country in 1638, an antecedent of General Henry Dearborn, who marched with Arnold to Quebec. He also took part in the second Battle of Saratoga, Monmouth, Sullivan's raid on the Iroquois villages, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and the surrender of Cornwallis, among others. Some of the general's diaries were published, and he and his wife corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, exchanging garden seeds.
General Dearborn's son, of the same name and rank, published half a dozen books, but L'Amour was only able to locate one of them, a biography of William Bainbridge, commander of "Old Ironsides." The book was published posthumously by Princeton University Press.
L'Amour stressed the fact he had never taken a creative writing course, and that his post tenth-grade education had been earned from voluminous reading. While in Oklahoma City, L'Amour assisted Foster Harris and Walter Campbell in their creative writing courses after he began to publish. He later lectured at more than forty institutions of higher learning, principally the University of Oklahoma. He was also a featured speaker for the National Convention of Genealogists in San Francisco.
"I get many questions about people mentioned in my stories—people looking for relatives or family histories—or about conditions at the time, or to clarify some point on which they lack understanding. Few people realize how much language and word usage have changed. Half the nonsense written about Shakespeare would not have happened if people knew more about the language and customs of the time. For example, they write of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, which in those days meant bawdy men."
L'Amour's constant research turned up the little known fact that Wild Bill Hickok's ancestors were tenant farmers on the property owned by Shakespeare. He insisted that credit for the factual unearthing go to English writer, Joseph Rosa.
The novelist's first published story sold to True Gang Life, and a few of his poems were featured in The Farmer's Stockman, an Oklahoma-based magazine. He also wrote boxing articles for a newspaper, sans payment, after meeting two pretty young news reporters in Oregon, who gave him a byline. He was fighting professionally at the time, and knocked out thirty-four of fifty-one opponents during his light heavyweight career. He first stepped between the ropes at age sixteen, and fought more heavyweights than those in his own weight division.
His first short story sales concerned the West Indies, football, rodeo, "detective yarns," and a few Westerns. "I'd grown up in the West and absorbed live background, but I was too close to it. I wanted to write about something far away, you see." He spent ten months in China, and bicycled across India during his twenty years in the merchant marines.
L'Amour's first big sale was Hondo, originally published in short story form by Collier's Magazine. "Dick Carroll of Fawcett Books asked me to come in, and he said, 'There's a novel here, and I'll buy it.' So I wrote it, and he bought it. Then John Wayne made a movie of it, and suddenly, everyone wanted Westerns."
The writer had an important decision to make. "Westerns have always been regarded in this country as second rate literature. I didn't agree with that. I never have. The paperback book was regarded as third or fourth rate, and I didn't agree with that either. So I sat down and had a very serious talk with myself. "Do I take the ball and run with it, or do I stay the same course I'm on?
"I decided to hell with it, that I was going to write damn good Westerns and I would make them accurate. I would show them that Westerns could be history, that they were important. Because to me, this was the most important phase of American history. The Western period, the pioneer period, did more to form American character than anything else done in this country. It should be taken seriously, and more attention should be given to it." The main difficulty he encountered was Eastern prejudice—those in the publishing business raised in the East, with little understanding of life west of the Mississippi River.
L'Amour did not come into his own as a writer until mid-life, much like English novelist Joseph Conrad, who also spent years at sea before settling down to write. While L'Amour lived in Oklahoma City, he realized "there was something drastically wrong" with his writing. "The short stories I sent out came back like homing pigeons. So I got a bunch of short stories and studied them to see how they were written. I found what I had been doing wrong and that's when I began to sell."
L'Amour's long-term association with Bantam Books began after his disillusionment with Fawcett, his first publisher, which only produced one of his novels a year. He said, "I have had, all the way along, to lead my publishers, sometimes by the nose. It hasn't been easy."
Saul David, a Bantam Books editor, told L'Amour he could write three books a year, but it took some persuasion on the writer's part, who liked "to write fast." He admired David's courage and his ability to "swim against the tide. If you told him something could not be done, he'd do it."
L'Amour maintained the schedule he had worked for years until just before his death, at 81. "I'm not rigid about it," he said. "I work every day, seven days a week, and that's not a problem. However, if something comes up and I want to take a little trip, I do it. I come back and go to work again."
Rising at 5:30 or 6:00, he'd read two Los Angeles newspapers and The Wall Street Journal before breakfast. His work day then began. At noon he sometimes stopped for lunch, often meeting friends at a restaurant. He said he occasionally went alone at an off-hour to make notes for a forthcoming novel, although he was rarely known to use them. "But, I can discuss it with myself, and the direction the book will follow."
He usually returned to his IBM Wheelwriter after lunch for an hour, or he used that time to read. He would also file mounds of research material crowding his large office. Three-foot stacks of paper neatly flanked three sides of his desk. He had no secretary and didn't want one, because "it would keep me busy finding work for her to do." Only he knew where to file research material so that he could find it. He also answered his own mail, but only a small percentage of some 5,000 letters that arrived annually.
His personal library contained more than 10,000 books, with hinged bookcases revealing floor-to-ceiling shelves behind the visible ones. He also left behind map drawers, much like those on ships, with geographical charts of every country on earth. The world was literally at his fingertips.
Little physical research was done during his latter years because he had already been there. "Usually I write about places I've been," he said. "I knocked around the world for twenty years, and one of the things I did was file a claim on a mining camp where I had to do a hundred hours work a year to hold it. Sometimes I hired somebody to do it, or miss out on a good job."
Although he only two-finger typed one draft, he admitted to rewriting on occasion. "Usually if I find something wrong, I rewrite the whole page. Occasionally I reread the previous day's work, and that's only when there's been a break in continuity. My feeling is that if one plans to rewrite, one is careless, figuring to pick it up the next time around. I wrote for the pulps and to make any money, one had to produce a lot. I drilled myself in getting it right the first time."
His wife Kathy proofread his work, checking for typos and redundancies. She rarely found misspelled words and no one changed his work, "not even editors. They never have, not since that first sale when the editor sent my story back and said to cut 1,500 words. I thought, 'Ah baloney, I just don't know how I could possibly do that. I hate it." Chuckling, he added: "Now when I look at it, I wonder where all the words went."
During the mid-1980s, his novels crowded book store racks along with adult Westerns that he hated. "Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, the Brontes, Checkov, Thackeray, and many others, who used sex, did it with wit and charm," he said. "Sex in current books is clumsily done, indicating that most writers really know very little about it. They write like a bunch of small boys out behind a barn. They are crudely lewd. There's no fun in their sex and nobody appears to be having a good time."
L'Amour advised fledglings to read and write "everything you can. Keep writing, putting words on paper and learn to express yourself. One difficulty I find of people who write is that they don't read enough. And our schools aren't giving enough background in American literature. I think you should have a pretty good idea what's been done before you try to do it. And you can learn some valuable things by writing. I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant."
A sentimentalist, L'Amour adopted a white dove before his first novel sold. The dove had taken up residence in the novelist's garage and was brought into the house and named Rama-Cita after two deities of East Indian mythology. The name was later shortened to Rama when the bird was found to be male. The dove could be heard throughout the L'Amour's large Spanish-style home as though in an echo chamber, and outlived most of its species as the writer's "good luck mascot."
Louis L'Amour was visibly proud of his children. His son Beau, at the time of the interview, was a film producer's creative consultant, who wrote in his famous father's wake. His pretty younger sister Angelique also writes. Both L'Amour offspring planned at the time to produce biographies of their father, in addition to the one he was writing at the time of his death. L'Amour wanted to be remembered as a storyteller—a man who told the American story, or one version of it."
Among his legion of books, Walking Drum, a twelfth century adventure, was the most fun to write. When asked which had been his favorite, he said, "I like them all. There's bits and pieces of books that I think are good. I never rework a book. I'd rather use what I've learned on the next one, you see, and make it a little bit better.
"The worst of it is that I'm no longer a kid and I'm just now getting to be a good writer. Just now."
(Excerpted from Maverick Writers and Weserners: Candid & Historic Interviews)
© 2012 Jean Henry-Mead
 |
| 1908-1988 |
Louis Dearborn L'Amour (La Moore) was not only the West's best-selling storyteller, he was the consummate Western man, a pattern for the white-hatted heroes he wrote about. Hardworking and soft-spoken, he was proud of his accomplishments, yet despite rumors to the contrary, he was often shy in his remembrances. L'Amour literally elevated himself by his proverbial boot straps, and in the process, left footprints in the marketing landscape that few writers will be able to fill.
Luck had nothing to do with his success, he said not long before his death in 1988. "Nor have I had any connections or breaks that I did not create for myself. I just tried to write the best I could about things I knew."
There are realities that writers must consider, he was quick to add. "No publisher is going to do anything for you that you don't earn. They simply can't afford to. Once a writer proves he can make money, they will often extend themselves. There's no magic, just hard work."
The work ethic was instilled in L'Amour as a child by his parents in Jamestown, North Dakota. His father, a veterinarian and farm machinery salesman, was involved in local politics. He served as alderman of Jamestown's largest ward for many years as well as deputy sheriff, but he lost his mayoral race. "People in small towns doubled in brass, you might say."
Young Louie enjoyed playing cowboys and Indians, and roughhoused in the family barn, which doubled as his father's veterinary hospital. He did more than his share of reading, particularly G. A. Henty, an Englishman who wrote of wars through the nineteenth century. L'Amour said, "It enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn't have about wars and politics."
The L'Amour family library encompassed some five hundred books, among them the works of Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, and Poe, as well as popular American and English writers. The youngest of the L'Amour children, Louie remembered reading a five-volume Collier's History of the World while he was small enough to sit in his father's lap.
"I think all things you read influence your writing to some degree. And if you don't learn anything else, you learn something about living and the use of words."
His serious reading began at twelve with a collection of biographies titled The Genius of Solitude. "The only one I remember is Socrates, the first chapter, but I remember it well." A book of natural history followed, which he tried unsuccessfully to locate years later for his children. During adolescence, L'Amour immersed himself in books of chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and the history of aircraft.
His concentrated self-education resulted in boredom with school. "I was just spinning my wheels," he said, "so it was no real hardship for me to leave. I had to go to work to find myself a change." L'Amour left school and Jamestown at fifteen, after completing the tenth grade. Since crop failures were common in North Dakota, and his father's livelihood was linked to the farming community, he decided to find his niche elsewhere. By hitchhiking and riding the rails, he arrived in Oklahoma City to visit an older brother, who was the governor's secretary, but he soon moved on.
"By then I was broke and I got a job in West Texas skinning dead cattle that died from a prolonged drought. They had been dead a while. Some fellow was trying to save the hides and it was the most miserable job, but I learned a lot." The young man's boss was a seventy-nine-year-old wrangler raised by Apaches, who had ridden on war parties with Nana and Geronimo. "He was a very, very, hard old boy but I got along with him fine. He was the first to teach me about tracking and using herbs."
L'Amour left his odorous job, after three months sleeping on the ground and staying downwind from passersby. He had helped skin 965 head of cattle by staking their skulls and tying their hides to the bumper of an early model pickup truck.
His next job was baling hay in New Mexico's Pecos Valley, across the road from Billy the Kid's grave. He visited the Maxwell home where Billy had been killed, and talked to the woman who offered the outlaw his last meal. L'Amour remembered her as "a pretty sharp old lady who still had all her buttons." He then talked to Judge Cole in Ruidoso, and got to know some thirty former gunfighters, rangers, and outlaws in the area. He regretted not knowing about a number of others.
While wandering about the West, he joined a circus in Phoenix, leaving three weeks later in El Paso. He then hoboed his way to Galveston, Texas, where he hired on as a merchant seaman. His first cruise was to the West Indies, his second to the British Isles. He tried his hand at writing during his travels, but his scribblings didn't include events as familiar as his Western heritage.
L'Amour's family history is rich in frontier adventure. His maternal great-grandfather was scalped by the Sioux while a member of the Sibley Expedition, following the Little Crow Massacre in Minnesota. Both his grandfathers served in the Union army during the Civil War, and his maternal grandfather taught him military tactics by drawing battle plans on a blackboard.
The novelist was especially proud of his mother's ancestry, beginning with Godfrey Dearborn, who arrived in this country in 1638, an antecedent of General Henry Dearborn, who marched with Arnold to Quebec. He also took part in the second Battle of Saratoga, Monmouth, Sullivan's raid on the Iroquois villages, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and the surrender of Cornwallis, among others. Some of the general's diaries were published, and he and his wife corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, exchanging garden seeds.
General Dearborn's son, of the same name and rank, published half a dozen books, but L'Amour was only able to locate one of them, a biography of William Bainbridge, commander of "Old Ironsides." The book was published posthumously by Princeton University Press.
L'Amour stressed the fact he had never taken a creative writing course, and that his post tenth-grade education had been earned from voluminous reading. While in Oklahoma City, L'Amour assisted Foster Harris and Walter Campbell in their creative writing courses after he began to publish. He later lectured at more than forty institutions of higher learning, principally the University of Oklahoma. He was also a featured speaker for the National Convention of Genealogists in San Francisco.
"I get many questions about people mentioned in my stories—people looking for relatives or family histories—or about conditions at the time, or to clarify some point on which they lack understanding. Few people realize how much language and word usage have changed. Half the nonsense written about Shakespeare would not have happened if people knew more about the language and customs of the time. For example, they write of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, which in those days meant bawdy men."
L'Amour's constant research turned up the little known fact that Wild Bill Hickok's ancestors were tenant farmers on the property owned by Shakespeare. He insisted that credit for the factual unearthing go to English writer, Joseph Rosa.
The novelist's first published story sold to True Gang Life, and a few of his poems were featured in The Farmer's Stockman, an Oklahoma-based magazine. He also wrote boxing articles for a newspaper, sans payment, after meeting two pretty young news reporters in Oregon, who gave him a byline. He was fighting professionally at the time, and knocked out thirty-four of fifty-one opponents during his light heavyweight career. He first stepped between the ropes at age sixteen, and fought more heavyweights than those in his own weight division.
His first short story sales concerned the West Indies, football, rodeo, "detective yarns," and a few Westerns. "I'd grown up in the West and absorbed live background, but I was too close to it. I wanted to write about something far away, you see." He spent ten months in China, and bicycled across India during his twenty years in the merchant marines.
L'Amour's first big sale was Hondo, originally published in short story form by Collier's Magazine. "Dick Carroll of Fawcett Books asked me to come in, and he said, 'There's a novel here, and I'll buy it.' So I wrote it, and he bought it. Then John Wayne made a movie of it, and suddenly, everyone wanted Westerns."
The writer had an important decision to make. "Westerns have always been regarded in this country as second rate literature. I didn't agree with that. I never have. The paperback book was regarded as third or fourth rate, and I didn't agree with that either. So I sat down and had a very serious talk with myself. "Do I take the ball and run with it, or do I stay the same course I'm on?
"I decided to hell with it, that I was going to write damn good Westerns and I would make them accurate. I would show them that Westerns could be history, that they were important. Because to me, this was the most important phase of American history. The Western period, the pioneer period, did more to form American character than anything else done in this country. It should be taken seriously, and more attention should be given to it." The main difficulty he encountered was Eastern prejudice—those in the publishing business raised in the East, with little understanding of life west of the Mississippi River.
L'Amour did not come into his own as a writer until mid-life, much like English novelist Joseph Conrad, who also spent years at sea before settling down to write. While L'Amour lived in Oklahoma City, he realized "there was something drastically wrong" with his writing. "The short stories I sent out came back like homing pigeons. So I got a bunch of short stories and studied them to see how they were written. I found what I had been doing wrong and that's when I began to sell."
L'Amour's long-term association with Bantam Books began after his disillusionment with Fawcett, his first publisher, which only produced one of his novels a year. He said, "I have had, all the way along, to lead my publishers, sometimes by the nose. It hasn't been easy."
Saul David, a Bantam Books editor, told L'Amour he could write three books a year, but it took some persuasion on the writer's part, who liked "to write fast." He admired David's courage and his ability to "swim against the tide. If you told him something could not be done, he'd do it."
L'Amour maintained the schedule he had worked for years until just before his death, at 81. "I'm not rigid about it," he said. "I work every day, seven days a week, and that's not a problem. However, if something comes up and I want to take a little trip, I do it. I come back and go to work again."
Rising at 5:30 or 6:00, he'd read two Los Angeles newspapers and The Wall Street Journal before breakfast. His work day then began. At noon he sometimes stopped for lunch, often meeting friends at a restaurant. He said he occasionally went alone at an off-hour to make notes for a forthcoming novel, although he was rarely known to use them. "But, I can discuss it with myself, and the direction the book will follow."
He usually returned to his IBM Wheelwriter after lunch for an hour, or he used that time to read. He would also file mounds of research material crowding his large office. Three-foot stacks of paper neatly flanked three sides of his desk. He had no secretary and didn't want one, because "it would keep me busy finding work for her to do." Only he knew where to file research material so that he could find it. He also answered his own mail, but only a small percentage of some 5,000 letters that arrived annually.
His personal library contained more than 10,000 books, with hinged bookcases revealing floor-to-ceiling shelves behind the visible ones. He also left behind map drawers, much like those on ships, with geographical charts of every country on earth. The world was literally at his fingertips.
Little physical research was done during his latter years because he had already been there. "Usually I write about places I've been," he said. "I knocked around the world for twenty years, and one of the things I did was file a claim on a mining camp where I had to do a hundred hours work a year to hold it. Sometimes I hired somebody to do it, or miss out on a good job."
Although he only two-finger typed one draft, he admitted to rewriting on occasion. "Usually if I find something wrong, I rewrite the whole page. Occasionally I reread the previous day's work, and that's only when there's been a break in continuity. My feeling is that if one plans to rewrite, one is careless, figuring to pick it up the next time around. I wrote for the pulps and to make any money, one had to produce a lot. I drilled myself in getting it right the first time."
His wife Kathy proofread his work, checking for typos and redundancies. She rarely found misspelled words and no one changed his work, "not even editors. They never have, not since that first sale when the editor sent my story back and said to cut 1,500 words. I thought, 'Ah baloney, I just don't know how I could possibly do that. I hate it." Chuckling, he added: "Now when I look at it, I wonder where all the words went."
During the mid-1980s, his novels crowded book store racks along with adult Westerns that he hated. "Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, the Brontes, Checkov, Thackeray, and many others, who used sex, did it with wit and charm," he said. "Sex in current books is clumsily done, indicating that most writers really know very little about it. They write like a bunch of small boys out behind a barn. They are crudely lewd. There's no fun in their sex and nobody appears to be having a good time."
L'Amour advised fledglings to read and write "everything you can. Keep writing, putting words on paper and learn to express yourself. One difficulty I find of people who write is that they don't read enough. And our schools aren't giving enough background in American literature. I think you should have a pretty good idea what's been done before you try to do it. And you can learn some valuable things by writing. I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant."
A sentimentalist, L'Amour adopted a white dove before his first novel sold. The dove had taken up residence in the novelist's garage and was brought into the house and named Rama-Cita after two deities of East Indian mythology. The name was later shortened to Rama when the bird was found to be male. The dove could be heard throughout the L'Amour's large Spanish-style home as though in an echo chamber, and outlived most of its species as the writer's "good luck mascot."
Louis L'Amour was visibly proud of his children. His son Beau, at the time of the interview, was a film producer's creative consultant, who wrote in his famous father's wake. His pretty younger sister Angelique also writes. Both L'Amour offspring planned at the time to produce biographies of their father, in addition to the one he was writing at the time of his death. L'Amour wanted to be remembered as a storyteller—a man who told the American story, or one version of it."
Among his legion of books, Walking Drum, a twelfth century adventure, was the most fun to write. When asked which had been his favorite, he said, "I like them all. There's bits and pieces of books that I think are good. I never rework a book. I'd rather use what I've learned on the next one, you see, and make it a little bit better.
"The worst of it is that I'm no longer a kid and I'm just now getting to be a good writer. Just now."
(Excerpted from Maverick Writers and Weserners: Candid & Historic Interviews)
© 2012 Jean Henry-Mead
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