Louis L'Amour was a book publisher's dream. At 6'2" and 215 pounds he looked as if he had stepped off the pages of his most recent Western novel. Combining an indefatigable zest for writing with an acumen for tireless self-promotion, L'Amour became one of the best-selling authors of his generation. By the time he died in 1988, he had surpassed Zane Grey as the most popular writer of Western fiction in American history. Like his predecessor, he was a practitioner of what L'Amour scholar Michael T. Marsden in “The Popular Western as Cultural Artifact” has labeled “the West as ought to have been.” With a dependable formula of tough laconic protagonists and violent physical confrontations, his heroes personified to several generations of fans the embodiment of the legendary frontier hero.

Louis L'Amour was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore in Jamestown, North Dakota, on 22 March 1908. He would shorten his name to the...