Document Type

Book

Publication Date

2002

Abstract

I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks, I know it’s literature and I know it will be read 100 years from now.
—Louis L'Amour on his work (Jackson 168)

In 1946, publisher and editor Leo Margulies invited Louis L’Amour to a party in New York. Each of them had a problem. L’Amour, having served in the Army during World War II, had recently returned to the States to discover the pulp fiction markets in which he had established himself as a writer were changing. In the 1930s, he had sold numerous adventure, sports, and detective stories to magazines such as Thrilling Adventures and Lands of Romance. Now, because of television, cheap paperbacks, and other cultural forces, these markets were disappearing. As L’Amour put it, “I wrote pulps for several years and at the end of the time I was making a very good living at it. Then overnight they were gone like snow in the desert” (Davidson, Lupoff, and Wolinsky 164). One genre, however, was flourishing. The western was entering a golden age. In 1945, there were over three dozen markets for western stories (Cawelti 31). In 1950, at least 110 western films were made (Levy 75), and by the end of the decade westerns accounted for a significant percentage of published fiction. For people in the industry like Margulies, the problem was finding enough material. He asked L’Amour, “Why don’t you write me some Western stories? I need Westerns in the worst way” (Davidson, Lupoff, and Wolinsky 164). L’Amour agreed to try. In the next three years, he would produce almost a hundred stories for magazines such as Popular Western, Thrilling Westerns, and Texas Rangers. It was an unexpected development for someone who, by his own admission, “never really intended to write Westerns at all” (Dye 355).

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