Education Of A Wandering Man

From his decision to leave school at fifteen to roam the world, to his recollections of life as a hobo on the Southern Pacific Railroad, as a cattle skinner in Texas, as a merchant seaman in Singapore and the West Indies, and as an itinerant bare-knuckled prizefighter across small-town America, here is Louis L'Amour's memoir of his lifelong love affair with learning—from books, from yondering, and from some remarkable men and women—that shaped him as a storyteller and as a man. Like classic L'Amour fiction, Education of a Wandering Man mixes authentic frontier drama--such as the author's desperate efforts to survive a sudden two-day trek across the blazing Mojave desert--with true-life characters like Shanghai waterfront toughs, desert prospectors, and cowboys whom Louis L'Amour met while traveling the globe. At last, in his own words, this is a story of a one-of-a-kind life lived to the fullest . . . a life that inspired the books that will forever enable us to relive our glorious frontier heritage.

“Over the years I have been proud to write about the men and women of the American frontier. But I have written many stories with entirely different settings which I have long wanted to share with my readers. “I have collected some of these in Yondering. They are glimpses of what my own life was like during the early years. Those were the rough years; often I was hungry, out of work and facing situations such as I have since written about. “Although these stories take place in a variety of locales, they are stories of people living under conditions similar to the way they might have lived on the frontier. I hope you’ll enjoy Yondering.” —Louis L’Amour

Here is the book that Louis L'Amour fans everywhere have been eagerly awaiting. The Louis L'Amour Companion chronicles the extraordinary life and career of America's favorite storyteller, from his early days as a pulp fiction writer to his well-earned place as one of history's best-selling authors. Biographical sketches, rare out-of-print articles, previously unpublished correspondence, and personal recollections and reviews by fellow writers such as Harlan Ellison, Ed Gorman, and Judith Tarr reveal as never before the larger-than-life story of the real man behind the legendary fiction. Inside you'll find a treasure trove of information unavailable in any other single source, including: L'Amour's first published story--never before collected in book form. A complete chronicle of L'Amour's novels and short stories, including synopses, publication dates, and histories. A listing of rare, still uncollected L'Amour stories. A checklist of L'Amour novels and stories adapted to film, television, and audiotape. Rare photos of L'Amour, memories, and memorabilia. For both collectors and fans of L'Amour's great fiction, The Louis L'Amour Companion is the next best thing to sitting beside the fire with your favorite storyteller.

For decades, generations of readers have shared their favorite passages of favorite Louis L'Amour novels and short stories: parents with their children, neighbors with their friends, executives with their staff and clergy with their congregations. They pass around dog-eared copies of the books, underlined and yellowing, recalling words that echoes in their readers' hearts and minds long after the last page was turned. Now, many of these selections have been collected in a remarkable volume representing some of the richest ore of the L'Amour lode: voices that heralded the settling of the frontier, of the man and women whose spirit and soul shaped our nation. In these words, Louis L'Amour describes the American experience, bringing our heritage to life, in ways no other author has. No L'Amour reader has a more unique perspective on his work than Angelique, his only daughter. In an extraordinary feat for every Louis L'Amour fan, and in loving appreciation of her father, she has compiled A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L'Amour, drawn from her father's best-loved works of fiction, including the Sackett novels, Last of the Breed, The Walking Drum and nearly two dozen others. "By reading his words, each reader has met a part of my father," she writes in her introduction. "Each hero has a bit of Dad's experience that makes him who he is. With Lanso, it is all those boxing matches as Dad grew up. With Barnabas Sackett, it is the sailor and explorer in my father...I think that this collection of quotations from my father's books reveals much of what makes Dad who he is, for these words are the heart and soul of what he believes, and what he wants to leave behind." Angelique has selected nearly a thousand of her favorite, most powerful and poignant L'Amour quotations--arranged by category and annotated with the book in which it appears--on more than a score of universal subjects such as: Love, Friendship and Loyalty; Family and Home; Honor, the Law and Justice; the Frontier; Women; and Men and Bravery. One such example from Sackett's Land: "He never knew when he was whipped--so he never was." A wonderful gift from a daughter to her father--and from Angelique L'Amour to her father's readers--A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L'Amour will be a cherished keepsake of words to enjoy, and words to live by.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Uprooted and Spinning Silver comes the first book of the Scholomance trilogy, the story of an unwilling dark sorceress who is destined to rewrite the rules of magic. FINALIST FOR THE LODESTAR AWARD • “The dark school of magic I’ve been waiting for.”—Katherine Arden, author of the Winternight Trilogy I decided that Orion Lake needed to die after the second time he saved my life. Everyone loves Orion Lake. Everyone else, that is. Far as I’m concerned, he can keep his flashy combat magic to himself. I’m not joining his pack of adoring fans. I don’t need help surviving the Scholomance, even if they do. Forget the hordes of monsters and cursed artifacts, I’m probably the most dangerous thing in the place. Just give me a chance and I’ll level mountains and kill untold millions, make myself the dark queen of the world. At least, that’s what the world expects. Most of the other students in here would be delighted if Orion killed me like one more evil thing that’s crawled out of the drains. Sometimes I think they want me to turn into the evil witch they assume I am. The school certainly does. But the Scholomance isn’t getting what it wants from me. And neither is Orion Lake. I may not be anyone’s idea of the shining hero, but I’m going to make it out of this place alive, and I’m not going to slaughter thousands to do it, either. Although I’m giving serious consideration to just one. With flawless mastery, Naomi Novik creates a school bursting with magic like you’ve never seen before, and a heroine for the ages—a character so sharply realized and so richly nuanced that she will live on in hearts and minds for generations to come. The magic of the Scholomance trilogy continues in The Last Graduate “The can’t-miss fantasy of fall 2020, a brutal coming-of-power story steeped in the aesthetics of dark academia. . . . A Deadly Education will cement Naomi Novik’s place as one of the greatest and most versatile fantasy writers of our time.”—BookPage (starred review) “A must-read . . . Novik puts a refreshingly dark, adult spin on the magical boarding school. . . . Readers will delight in the push-and-pull of El and Orion’s relationship, the fantastically detailed world, the clever magic system, and the matter-of-fact diversity of the student body.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Little did Louis L'Amour realize back in 1960 when he published The Daybreakers, a novel about two brothers who came west after the Civil War, that he had begun creating what would become perhaps North America's most widely followed literary family: the Sacketts. The stories of ten generations of Sackett men and women as they forged westward from tyranny-wracked seventeenth-century England across the American continent have captivated readers for three decades through seventeen novels with nearly forty millions copies in print. The traditions and adventures of this family of rugged individualists who stand indomitably united when any Sackett is in trouble have inspired country songs, a popular television miniseries starring Tom Selleck (as Orrin Sackett) and Sam Elliot (as Tell Sackett), thousands of reader queries—and now, a rare full-length work of non-fiction by the worlds' all-time best-selling frontier novelist. In a 60 Minutes profile in which he hailed Louis L'Amour as "our professor emeritus of how the West was won," correspondent Morley Safer observed that "his plots may be fiction but the details therein are fact." The Sackett Companion is the author's long-savored opportunity to present the research and probe the factors behind his Sackett fiction—novel by novel—and to elaborate on their real and fictional characters, their geography and locales, and their historical eras in encyclopedia-like detail. In this book, subtitled A Personal Guide To The Sackett Novels, L'Amour takes us on a guided tour of his imagination to introduce us to the never-before-told sources and inspirations for these stories and the people and places that populate them. He retraces some of his travels in which he has walked the land the Sacketts walk, reliving such personal memories as the street fight he had on a hot dusty morning in New Mexico that ultimately led to the birth of the Sacketts.