The Louis L Amour Companion

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 Biographical sketches, rare out-of-print articles, previously unpublished correspondence, and personal recollections and reviews by fellow writers such as Harlan Ellison, Ed Gorman, and Judith Tarr reveal as never before the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.

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.

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.

An illustrated companion to the frontier fiction of an American icon.

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.

William Tell Sackett had followed a different path from his younger brothers, but his name, like theirs, was spoken with respect and just a little fear. Where Orrin had brought law and order from New Mexico to the plains of Montana, backed up by the gunfighting talents of his brother Tye, Tell Sackett’s destiny drew him to Texas after he had to kill a man. There, in the high, lonesome country, he came upon a vein of pure gold. All he’d wanted was enough to buy a ranch, but he soon learned that gold had ways of its own with men.

In Jubal Sackett, the second generation of Louis L’Amour’s great American family pursues a destiny in the wilderness of a sprawling new land. Jubal Sackett’s urge to explore drove him westward, and when a Natchez priest asks him to undertake a nearly impossible quest, Sackett ventures into the endless grassy plains the Indians call the Far Seeing Lands. He seeks a Natchez exploration party and its leader, Itchakomi. It is she who will rule her people when their aging chief dies, but first she must vanquish her rival, the arrogant warrior Kapata. Sackett’s quest will bring him danger from an implacable enemy . . . and show him a life—and a woman—worth dying for.

Louis L’Amour has been best known for his ability to capture the spirit and drama of the authentic American West. Now he guides his readers to an even more distant frontier—the enthralling lands of the twelfth century. Warrior, lover, and scholar, Kerbouchard is a daring seeker of knowledge and fortune bound on a journey of enormous challenge, danger, and revenge. Across Europe, over the Russian steppes, and through the Byzantine wonders of Constantinople, Kerbouchard is thrust into the treacheries, passions, violence, and dazzling wonders of a magnificent time. From castle to slave galley, from sword-racked battlefields to a princess’s secret chamber, and ultimately, to the impregnable fortress of the Valley of Assassins, The Walking Drum is a powerful adventure in an ancient world that you will find every bit as riveting as Louis L’Amour’s stories of the American West.