Summary
Here is a very special Louis L'Amour book, a book to be treasured by his many fans and by a whole new audience of readers, for Frontier is an eye-opening celebration of the American land, including 213 pages of text and colorful illustrations of the beautiful West.
"Frontier is a very special book for me.
For more than thirty years in more than two hundred novels and short stories, I have written about many aspects of the American frontier experience-from the courageous explorers and early settlers of the sixteenth century on through the succeeding generations of the builders and shapers who followed them across the continent. However, for a long time, I have wanted to temporarily leave behind the boundaries of fiction to share more directly with my readers some of what I have learned and observed about our great North American land during a lifetime of study and appreciation.
This land, which we hold in trust for future generations and which is ours to improve while we live, is a remarkable land. The landscape has enormous variety, which sometimes escapes visitors. In the twenty-five essays that follow I have tried to offer a few brief aspects of the history, geology, excitement, wonder, and overwhelming power of this land."
-Louis L'Amour, from Chapter I
Born in Jamestown, North Dakota on March 22, 1908, Louis L'Amour's adventurous life could have been the subject of one of his novels. Striking out on his own in 1923, at age 15, L'Amour began a peripatetic existence, taking whatever jobs were available, from skinning dead cattle to being a sailor. L'Amour knew early in life that he wanted to be a writer, and the experiences of those years serve as background for some of his later fiction. During the 1930s he published short stories and poetry; his career was interrupted by army service in World War II. After the war, L'Amour began writing for western pulp magazines and wrote several books in the Hopalong Cassidy series using the pseudonym Tex Burns.
His first novel, Westward the Tide (1950), serves as an example of L'Amour's frontier fiction, for it is an action-packed adventure story containing the themes and motifs that he uses throughout his career. His fascination with history and his belief in the inevitability of manifest destiny are clear. Also present and typical of L'Amour's work are the strong, capable, beautiful heroine who is immediately attracted to the equally capable hero; a clear moral split between good and evil; reflections on the Native Americans, whose land and ways of life are being disrupted; and a happy ending. Although his work is somewhat less violent than that of other western writers, L'Amour's novels all contain their fair share of action, usually in the form of gunfights or fistfights.
L'Amour's major contribution to the western genre is his attempt to create, in 40 or more books, the stories of three families whose histories intertwine as the generations advance across the American frontier. The novels of the Irish Chantry, English Sackett, and French Talon families are L'Amour's most ambitious project, and sadly were left unfinished at his death. Although L'Amour did not complete all of the novels, enough of the series exists to demonstrate his vision.
L'Amour's strongest attribute is his ability to tell a compelling story; readers do not mind if the story is similar to one they have read before, for in the telling, L'Amour adds enough small twists of plot and detail to make it worth the reader's while. L'Amour fans also enjoy the bits of information he includes about everything from wilderness survival skills to finding the right person to marry. These lessons give readers the sense that they are getting their money's worth, that there is more to a L'Amour novel than sheer escapism. With over 200 million copies of his books in print worldwide, L'Amour must be counted as one of the most influential writers of westerns in this century. He died from lung cancer on June 10, 1988.
(Bowker Author Biography)
