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Author

Louis L’Amour

97 fiction

Louis L’Amour (1908–1988) was an American novelist and short-story writer best known for historical adventure stories of the American West. Born Louis Dearborn LaMoore in Jamestown, North Dakota, he left school as a teenager and spent years travelling across the United States and overseas, working as a miner, lumberjack, merchant seaman, boxer and labourer. During the Second World War he served in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps. These experiences fed into a writing career built around frontier communities, cattle drives, gunfighters, soldiers, explorers and settlers. L’Amour eventually wrote more than 100 novels and short-story collections and became one of the most widely read writers of Western fiction. Although his novels are adventures rather than academic reconstructions, he researched trails, geography, weapons, Native peoples and frontier history extensively.

Much of L’Amour’s fiction is historical, particularly his novels set in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American West. The large Sackett sequence traces generations of the Sackett family from Elizabethan England and early settlement in North America through the westward expansion of the United States, with books including Sackett’s Land, To the Far Blue Mountains, The Warrior’s Path, Jubal Sackett, Ride the River, The Daybreakers, Sackett and The Sackett Brand. Other important historical novels include Hondo, set in the Southwest during the Apache Wars; The Walking Drum, an unusual L’Amour novel set across twelfth-century Europe and the Mediterranean; The Lonesome Gods, set in nineteenth-century California; The Californios, dealing with Spanish and Mexican California; How the West Was Won, following several generations through American westward expansion; and The Cherokee Trail, The Quick and the Dead, Bendigo Shafter and Conagher. His strongest historical settings are therefore the American frontier, Old West, Native American conflicts, westward migration and early American settlement, with occasional ventures into medieval and early modern history.

Periods and events

American Civil War1861–1865 CE Apache Wars and Chiricahua Resistance1849–1886 CE California Gold Rush1848–1855 CE Cattle Drives and Cowboy Era1866–1890 CE Colorado Territory Settlement1861–1876 CE Early American Republic1783–1815 CE Early Cold War Espionage1945–1965 CE Early Colonial America1607–1763 CE Elizabethan Age1558–1603 CE Emancipation and Reconstruction1863–1877 CE First Transcontinental Railroad1863–1869 High Medievalc. 1000–1300 CE Indian Wars of the American West1850–1890 CE Late Cold War Espionage1966–1991 CE Montana Territory Settlement and Statehood1864–1889 Native American Historyc. 15,000 BCE–present Old West and Frontier America1803–1912 CE Oregon Trail Migration1840–1869 CE Post-Civil-War U.S.–Mexico Borderlands1865–1880 CE Railroad Expansion in the American West1865–1900 CE Texas Rangers on the Frontier1835–1901 CE Texas–Comanche Conflict1821–1875 CE Western Outlaws and Frontier Lawmen1865–1900 CE World War II1939–1945 CE Wyoming Range Wars and Homesteader Conflictc. 1870–1895 CE

Historical fiction

Historical fiction series by Louis L’Amour (4 series)

Sacketts in Order

by Louis L’Amour 17 books 4.5(53,750)

The Sacketts is Louis L’Amour’s seventeen-novel family chronicle, beginning with Barnabas Sackett in Elizabethan England and following successive generations into colonial North America and the nineteenth-century American West. The sequence moves from Atlantic migration and early settlement to river travel, cattle country, mining districts, Apache conflict and range…

Talon and Chantry in Order

by Louis L’Amour 8 books 4.4(10,053)

The Talon and Chantry novels form a loose multigenerational family sequence that L’Amour developed alongside the Sacketts. The books range from Tatton Chantry’s adventures in the Elizabethan Atlantic world through early American river and frontier exploration to nineteenth-century cattle drives, law enforcement and range conflict. The connection is…

Kilkenny in Order

by Louis L’Amour 3 books 4.4(5,222)

The Kilkenny novels follow Lance Kilkenny, a gunfighter who would prefer anonymity but repeatedly becomes involved when powerful men threaten smaller ranchers or communities. The three novel-length entries move through range disputes, hidden identities and the uneasy frontier boundary between private violence and local justice. Kilkenny’s reputation is…

Hopalong Cassidy in Order

by Louis L’Amour 4 books 2.5(20)

Louis L’Amour’s four Hopalong Cassidy novels were among his earliest published novels and were written under the pen name Tex Burns. Using the established Hopalong Cassidy and Bar-20 characters, L’Amour builds compact western mysteries around cattle theft, disputed land, hidden gold and violent attempts to manipulate frontier communities.…

Historical fiction

Standalone historical fiction by Louis L’Amour (65 books)

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