Of French-Irish extraction, his father Anglicized the family name to LaMoore. Louis was the seventh and last child born to Louis Charles LaMoore, a veterinarian, police chief, and farm machinery salesman, and Emily Lavisa Dearborn LaMoore, who gave up her dreams of writing to become a schoolteacher in order to raise a family. Louis inherited his mother's storytelling abilities and a predilection for the written word. His oldest sister, Edna LaMoore Waldo, would grow up to become a successful writer of historical nonfiction.
For L'Amour, writing seemed a natural avocation for someone who came from a family that he claimed produced thirty-three writers since 1816. He was always proud that he could trace his lineage in North America back to the early 1600s. According to his siblings, Louis had aspired to be a writer ever since childhood. As he admitted in a December 1980 interview with Arturo F. Gonzalez, L'Amour “never consciously planned to do anything with my life but write.”
L'Amour dropped out of school in the tenth grade when his family moved to Oklahoma in 1923. Leaving Jamestown at the age of fifteen, L'Amour struck out on his own, his wanderlust leading him to a diverse succession of odd jobs throughout the West and on a half-year trek around the world.
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