#1646 The Legacy of Louis L'Amour and American Western Fiction

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Clay interviews Beau L’Amour, the son of Louis L'Amour, the celebrated author of multi-million best-selling Westerns. Beau L’Amour is the manager of his father’s literary estate. By his passing at 80 in 1988, Louis L’Amour wrote just under 100 novels and more than 250 short stories. All of his books are still in print. Clay and Beau talked about changing views of the frontier, white-Native relations, and the role of violence in the American West. How well does Louis L’Amour hold up in our culturally sensitive time? Beau L’Amour is currently revisiting his father’s novels and providing afterwords in the books, sharing the backstory of their creation, their connection to film and television, and their place in the larger achievement of the famous author. Louis L’Amour, more than 30 years after his death, still ranks every year among the top 50 most popular writers in the world. You can read Clay’s essay about his talk with Beau L’Amour here. Their conversation was recorded on March 17, 2025.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this podcast introduction. This week, Bo Lemaure, the son of Louis Lomor.
0:09.0	Now, most of you will have heard the name Louis Lomor. It sort of fits in the same world as Zane Gray.
0:15.8	He wrote almost 100 Western novels, almost 100 novels, most of them about the American West.
0:23.3	He wrote more than 250 short stories.
0:27.9	50 film or television projects came out of his work.
0:32.5	So you're undoubtedly aware of the world of Louis Lamour to a certain extent.
0:37.2	He was a North Dakota born in Jamestown in 1908, left the state during the first
0:43.5	depression, the early Great Plains form of the Depression before the 30s, worked with his
0:50.4	father in Texas and the southwest on menial jobs, you know, getting to know the
0:57.0	world of work on the frontier, on the very late frontier, but meeting these sorts of colorful
1:03.0	people that then come to inhabit his books in different ways, wound up in Los Angeles,
1:09.0	and the end became a very wealthy, extraordinary individual.
1:13.4	And even though the literary critics tend to look down on his work as not really what they
1:19.6	do, it was pulp fiction, and we're well aware of that, his books hold up and they still sell
1:27.4	tens of millions of copies per year
1:29.9	worldwide. At one time he was translated into up to 27 languages. Currently, his books are
1:37.0	translated into four. The worldwide readership is gigantic for such things. And of course, the American West continues to have a huge hold on the European and the Asian imagination.
1:50.3	He said that India, for example, is one of the best-selling places for a Louis Lamour book.
1:56.3	So we had a wonderful conversation.
1:58.3	Really, what struck me most about it is how insightful Bo Lomor is.
2:05.1	I expected him to be interesting, of course. He's the executor of his father's works. There's still
2:10.7	a kind of Louis Lomor machine that continues to issue reprints. All the books are still in print.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Listening to America, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Listening to America and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.