Today’s post is a guest post by Will Oliver.

There is a writer we all know and love who was born in the American West in the 19-aughts, and his father was a doctor. When he first started writing, he churned out dozens of stories and sent them off to publishers with little acceptance. He finally got his first break with the pulp magazines and later published in such magazines as Thrilling Adventure. Although he wrote what is often called westerns, most of his stories were really about life on the frontier. He was also both a fan of boxing and was a boxer himself, and he incorporated this interest into many of his short stories.

He also had a distinct love for composing poetry, some of which was published, but he realized that he could not make a living from writing poetry. He wrote well over 200 short stories in his lifetime and wrote across many genres including westerns, adventure, and even science fiction. Although he did a lot of single character stories, some of his most popular writing included series involving the same characters. One of his most popular series was about a merchant sailor. He also wrote of a man named Sackett who came over from England and, on a few occasions, this author also did some ghost writing.

Early on in his career, some of his short stories found their way into a number of anthologies, and this increased the visibility of his name. The first book he ever published, however, was actually published in England, not in America. Later, some of his stories and characters were even made into television shows and movies.

He died in mid-June and his autobiography was published posthumously. Again, even though he wrote widely in many genres, he always believed that his most worthwhile contribution to the literary field was his western frontier stories.

And, of course, we all know I am writing about…………………………………………….

Louis L’Amour!

If you thought I was writing about Robert E. Howard, you are not far off the mark, but I was intentionally writing about Louis L’Amour. The similarities between not only their lives, but their writings are uncanny, yet in general, a reader does not usually associate one author with the other. Having read Louis L’Amour’s canon, especially his short stories, I found they were closer in tone, pace, and description to Howard’s stories than perhaps any other author I have ever read. And later, while researching and reading about Louis L’Amour’s life, I came to see the many parallels between these two frontier writers. The purpose of this essay is to compare both the biography and writing of these two authors in tandem, to demonstrate just how similar they truly are.

Howard & L’Amour Biographies

The biography I just offered was obviously that of Louis (pronounced Louie) L’Amour’s, but it could easily have been Robert E. Howard’s. Howard was born first, on January 22, 1906, while Louis L’Amour—born Louis Dearborn LaMoore—was born on March 22, 1908 (yes another coincidence, both being born on the 22^nd). Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, while L’Amour was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. Howard’s father was a doctor, Dr. Isaac Howard, and so, too, was L’Amour’s father, Dr. Louis Charles LaMoore. Howard’s father was a doctor of medicine, a small-town doctor, while LaMoore was a large-animal veterinarian.

Like most budding young authors, they both churned out dozens upon dozens of stories and received an equal number of rejection letters/notices. When Howard finally published a short story, it was “Spear and Fang” in Weird Tales magazine (July 1925), while L’Amour’s first published story was “Anything for a Pal” in True Gang Life (October 1935). Both men experienced publishing droughts soon after their first few stories appeared in print, before things finally began to open up for them. Both Howard and L’Amour also published some of their stories in the same pulp magazine, Thrilling Adventure. Howard published “The Treasures of Tartary” in the January 1935 issue and “Son of the White Wolf” in the December 1936 issue.  L’Amour published “Gloves for a Tiger” in the January 1938 issue, “Gold is How You Keep It” in the July 1941 issue, and “Well of the Unholy Light” in the September 1941 issue, among many others.

We know Robert E. Howard was a boxing fan and a boxer himself (see Mark Finn’s excellent biography, writings on the subject, and boxing panel at Howard Days), but so, too, was Louis L’Amour. As L’Amour once wrote:

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t boxing. My father and two brothers took a swing at it, and so I just about grew up with gloves on my hands. By the time I was thirteen, and already starting to grow up fast, I was working in the gym with professional fighters. (From Robert Weinberg’s The Louis L’Amour Companion, Bantam Books, 1994, p. 40)

As a teenager, and later in his wandering years, L’Amour made extra money by engaging in prize fights. A few times in his life he tried boxing full-time, and at other times he served as a trainer. Like Howard, he wrote articles on boxing and about boxing, but he also integrated boxing into many of his popular characters and short stories (see Howard’s collected fight stories in Waterfront Fists and Others, edited by Paul Herman and introduced by Mark Finn, Wildside Press, 2003, and the four volume series Fists of Iron from the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, edited by Patrice Louinet, Christopher Gruber, and Mark Finn).

Howard fell in love with poetry and became highly adept in its writing. He had some success in publishing his poetry during his lifetime, mostly in Weird Tales magazine, but it could not pay the bills, so he limited his time writing poetry in favor of the short story. Today, there are well over two dozen collections of Howard’s poetry that have been published since his death (see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, Robert E. Howard Press Foundation). L’Amour had an equal love for poetry; he spent much of his early career writing it and managed to publish Smoke from this Altar in 1939 with Lusk Publishing Company of Oklahoma City. It was reprinted and published posthumously in 1990. However, L’Amour, like Howard, realized there was no living to be made in writing poetry, so he, too, favored the short story, and later novels, to make a living.

Both authors wrote well over 250 short stories across many genres. Both Howard and L’Amour wrote westerns and adventure stories, and each even wrote a science fiction story—Howard’s Almuric and L’Amour’s The Haunted Mesa. Both of these novels were written later in their careers and always seem to receive very mixed reviews, so they may hold that in common as well.

Both Howard and L’Amour wrote a number of single character stories, but both of them had their greatest success with character series. A series of stories they both shared in common were their sailor stories—making one almost wonder if L’Amour didn’t take the character directly from Howard (since Sailor Steve Costigan came first). While Howard’s famous character was Sailor Steve Costigan, L’Amour’s highly popular character was Sailor “Ponga” Jim Mayo. Costigan appeared in many of the boxing-oriented magazines such as Fight Stories, Action Stories and Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine, while most of L’Amour’s Ponga Jim stories appeared in Thrilling Adventures. Howard’s boxing tales have been collected in numerous collections (Fists of Iron and Waterfront Fists), as well as Boxing Stories (University of Nebraska Press, 2005). So, too, can L’Amour’s stories be found in West from Singapore (Bantam, 2005) or The Collected Stories of Louis L’Amour, Volume 4 (part 2): The Adventure Stories (Bantam, 2006).

One of L’Amour’s most renowned series was that of the Sackett family. L’Amour traces different members of this family from England to America and then west in 17 separate novels. This may have been the most likely point in the opening biographical description I shared with you when you guessed who this article is about since it mentioned a character named Sackett. Most people would instantly become wise based on the popularity of that series, since any biography about L’Amour would mention the series. The book that details the Sacketts coming over from England was the novel Sackett’s Land. Howard also wrote of a Henry Sackett, a Texas Ranger, who had made his way from England to Texas in his only published non-fiction piece “The Ghost of Camp Colorado” The Texaco Star, April 1931).

We know that Howard did some ghost writing from time to time, such as on “The Last Ride” with Chandler Whipple that was published in the October 1935 issue of Western Aces as “Boot-Hill Payoff.” L’Amour also ghost wrote four novels that became a definite sore-spot for him throughout his career. After his service in World War II in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps, L’Amour was hungry. He was offered an opportunity to carry on writing about Clarence E. Mulford’s popular character Hopalong Cassidy and agreed, especially since William Boyd (an actor Howard also liked) had now made the character quite successful. L’Amour read the original novels and liked the rougher character than the one that had become popularized and agreed to write four novels under the name Tex Burns in that Mulford style. Later, as L’Amour’s career began to take off, he was asked if he was Tex Burns and he had said, “No.” He then kept that pretense up for the rest of his life, not wanting to acknowledge those novels were his. They are not bad novels, but they are not Louis L’Amour novels, so perhaps it is understandable he tried to keep his authorship a secret. However, if a reporter wanted to piss-off Louis, all they had to do was ask him about the Hopalong Cassidy novels.

Howard’s first published book was A Gent from Bear Creek, and it was published in London, England by Herbert Jenkins in 1937. Louis L’Amour’s first novel was Westward the Tide and it, too, was published first in London, England by The World’s Work in 1950. And both had some of their stories and characters made into television shows and movies. Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell” was adapted for the television show Thriller and, of course, his character Conan was used for Conan the Barbarian. L’Amour’s first movie based on one of his stories was actually East of Sumatra (1953), although most first think of Hondo (1953). The latter launched L’Amour to fame, for John Wayne had read the short story “The Gift of Cochise” in Collier’s Magazine and bought the rights to make the movie. When the movie came out in 1953, the book Hondo was also released at the same time, and both the movie and the book sold well. Both are fantastic and should be read/watched. Hollywood went on to make over two dozen films based on L’Amour’s writing.

Howard committed suicide on June 6, 1936, while L’Amour died of lung cancer at the age of 80 (Howard would have been 82) on June 10, 1988. Donald M. Grant published Howard’s semi-autobiographical novel Post Oaks & Sand Roughs in 1990, while L’Amour’s autobiography, Education of a Wandering Man, was published in 1989. Neither are autobiographies in the traditional sense for Howard’s is autobiography disguised as fiction, and L’Amour’s is the autobiography of his education through reading.

Howard always believed that his most worthwhile contribution to the literary field were his western frontier stories (see Robert E. Howard’s Western Tales, Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2013). As has been pointed out many times, even Howard’s Conan stories dealt with life on the frontier (see especially “Beyond the Black River” published on this blog by guest writer John Bullard). As Howard wrote in his last letter to Lovecraft, “I have always felt that if I ever accomplished anything worthwhile in the literary field, it would be with stories dealing of the central and western frontier” (Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 3:462). Recently, Todd Vick tried to provide evidence for the conjecture that Howard would have continued writing more and more in this genre (see Vick, Todd. 2018; “The Last Line of the Last Letter.” On An Underwood No. 5).  Had he done so, perhaps Howard would have achieved the same level of fame that Louis L’Amour had from writing his popular western frontier novels.

Throughout his life, Louis L’Amour spoke in much the same manner as Howard about writing about the frontier. “I do not distinguish Westerns at all from other kinds of novels,” L’Amour said in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly on October 8, 1973. “If you are going to characterize my stories I would prefer to have them called stories of the frontier” (Weinberg Companion, p. 249). In another interview just before his death, L’Amour said, “My stories are of the frontier wherever it happens to be” (Wienberg, Companion, p. 357). It seems that both Robert E. Howard and Louis L’Amour are, in many ways, kindred souls.

Howard & L’Amour Stories

To show the similarities between Howard and L’Amour, you only have to read some of their stories back-to-back or side by side. Taking a story from their westerns, here is one of the authors:

He was a tall man, wide in the shoulder and lean in waist and hips, an easy-moving man with none of the horseman’s awkwardness in walking. He moved like a hunter when on his own feet, and had been a hunter of many things, men not least among them. His hat was black and flat-crowned and flat-brimmed, held beneath his jaw by a loose thong. His shirt, once red, had faded to an indeterminate rose. His vest was of black cowhide, worn and scratched, and over his black jeans he wore fringed shotgun chaps. He wore a tied-down Smith & Wesson Russian .44 six-shooter, and the Winchester in his saddle-scabbard was the vintage of ’73.

Now the other:

The man was tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, lean-hipped, like one had spent his life in the saddle. His unruly black hair matched a face burned dark by the sun, but his eyes were a burning blue. Low on either hip the black butt of a heavy Colt jutted from a worn black leather scabbard. These guns seemed so much part of the man as his eyes or his hands. He had worn them so constantly and so long that their association was a natural as the use of his limbs.

The power of description is clearly present in both, with a certain economy of words, that quickly give a highly visual description of the character. In fact, the description of the two characters are very similar—tall, broad and wide shouldered, lean in the hips, comfortable in the saddle. The former description comes from Louis L’Amour’s novel Last Stand at Papago Wells (one of my top 10 favorites). The latter is from Robert E. Howard’s “The Vultures of Wahpeton.” Like people routinely say, Howard’s characters all come from the same mold. Well, that may be true, but the same thing could be said of L’Amour’s characters as well.

Since L’Amour’s greatest literary output was in frontier stories, generally referred to as westerns, it would be easy to continue doing comparisons, but so much of Howard can be seen in L’Amour’s writing that it is just easier to pick up one of his westerns and see what I am talking about. Besides just the comparisons, however, sometimes there are just phrases or statements or descriptions by L’Amour that strike me as being very Howardesque. The last novel I read by L’Amour was Passin’ Through, a good L’Amour novel, but not in my top 10. While reading it, there were two times when a passage took me out of the novel and struck me as being incredibly similar to Howard.

The first example came when the character, nicknamed “Passin’ Through,” is describing his wander lust and his outlook on life. At one point he explains, “Ridin’ alone, a man gets time to think. This here civilization we got is a mighty flimsy thing.” Compare that to Howard’s oft-quoted, “Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural.” Both are strikingly similar sentiments.

The second example comes later in the book, when Passin’ is riding along, searching for a possible threat. L’Amour writes,

Under cover of the trees I studied the layout, carefully examining each clump of trees, each approach. These were uneasy days, for enemies might be awaiting me behind any rock or bush. I looked to see how the shadows fell, how the birds flew, and where the deer fed. Each might give an indication of where an enemy was or wasn’t.

This reminded me of E. Hoffman Price’s anecdote about visiting Howard in Cross Plains and going out for a ride. As Price wrote in The Last Celt (Berkley Windhover Books 1976),

We were driving, as I said, to Brownwood, and were fascinated by Howard’s yarns. Suddenly, he took his foot off the throttle, cocked his head, idled down. We were approaching a clump of vegetation which was near the roadside. He reached across us, and to the side pocket. He took out a pistol, sized up the terrain, put the weapon back again, and resumed speed. He explained, in a matter of act tone, “I have a lot of enemies, everyone has around here. Wasn’t that I figured we were running into anything but I had to make sure.” (p. 87)

The sentiment of enemies hiding behind a rock or bush is the same. L’Amour delivers the line in all seriousness in the book. Price claimed that Howard also delivered it in all seriousness. We will never know for sure. I have a friend who deadpans everything he says, and 90% of what he says, he is pulling my leg. He’s a genuine Texan, so perhaps that was what Howard was doing. Regardless, the sentiment is the same and, again, the words jarred me out of the novel and made me think of Howard, and this is not isolated to just the novel Passin’ Through either.

Let’s switch genres and jump to the sailor stories both wrote. We all know of Sailor Steve Costigan, but Louis L’Amour had his character, Captain “Ponga” Jim Mayo, or just Ponga Jim. They are both sailors, they are both fighters, and they are both cut from the same mold. There are some differences between these characters. First, Steve Costigan has a bulldog, but sadly, Ponga Jim has no dog or pet. The second is that the Steve Costigan stories are often hilarious, while the Ponga Jim stories are played straight. Third, Steve Costigan’s stories are in the first-person narrative, although he is also an unreliable narrator, while the Ponga Jim stories are written in the third person. And, finally, Steve Costigan seems to sail the Pacific in the time period Howard wrote them, the 1930s, while Ponga Jim ventures about during World War II. Still, if you can imagine Sailor Steve Costigan fighting in World War II, the similarities kind of go away.

So many of the scenes in both of their sailor short stories play the same way, the similarities often override their differences. In “Waterfront Fists,” Sailor Steve Costigan is in a bar:

“Aw, you’re crazy,” I snapped, turning back to the bar, but watching him close from the corner of my eye. Which was a good thing because he started a wild right swing that had destruction wrote all over it. I side-stepped and he crashed into the bar. Rebounding with a bloodthirsty beller he lunged at me, and seeing they was no arguing with the misguided heathen, I stepped inside his swing and brought up a right uppercut to the jaw that lifted his whole two hundred and forty-five pounds clean off the floor and stood him on the back of his neck, out cold.

In “East of Gorontalo,” Sailor Ponga Jim Mayo is in a bar:

  Dago Frank’s eyes narrowed. He stepped closer.

“Then maybe you pull mine, eh?” he challenged.

Ponga Jim’s right fist snapped up in a jarring right that knocked every bit of wind from Dago Frank’s body.

Then jerking him erect, Mayo jolted another six-inch punch into his midsection and dropped him to the floor. Cooly, he picked up his beer and drank it.

Most of Ponga Jim’s adventures end with a fist fight, like most of the Sailor Steve Costigan stories. L’Amour even ended some of his westerns in this manner, such as Flint, Lando, and The Iron Marshal.  More important than just the fight scenes, however, is how Sailor Steve and Ponga Jim handle themselves in a scrap. As Weinberg explains,

Ponga Jim was the prototype for most of L’Amour’s future heroes. Tall and well-muscled, he was fast with his fists and his mind. Like all of Louis’s pulp protagonists, he was a man of action.  Jim’s solution to most problems was to barge ahead and count on his physical powers to keep him alive. (p. 174)

There is a similar sentiment written about Howard, again by E. Hoffman Price, who wrote of Howard’s characters:

They’re simpler. You get them in a jam, and no one expects you to rack your brains inventing clever ways for them to extricate themselves. They are too stupid to do anything but cut, shoot, or slug themselves into the clear.(E. Hoffman Price, “A Memory of R. E. Howard,” In Skull-Face and Others, Arkam House, 1946, p. xxii).

While there are, again, so many examples to draw upon for comparisons of Howard and L’Amour stories, perhaps shifting entirely to another form of writing they have in common, poetry, might showcase more of their similarities. Once again, let’s draw on at least one stanza from their poetry without identifying them up front. One wrote:

 And thus my soul, forever restlessly,

Longs for the outworld, vast, unultimate,

The vastly freedom of the swinging sea,

Forever roaming and forever free.

And the other:

 Out of the ocean’s depths, soundlessly moving—

Up from my memories disturbing and deep;

A spirit that urges me restlessly onward,

A dreaming that haunts me awake and asleep.

If you are very familiar with Howard’s poetry, this may have been obvious, but both employ the ocean or the sea in these poems, and they both share a similar sentiment. The first of the two stanzas comes from Howard’s “Ocean-Thoughts,” while the latter comes from Louis L’Amour’s longer title, “Out of the Ocean Depths Soundlessly Moving.”

Comparing poetry is more difficult, but there are similarities in many of the themes that are both drawn upon for their poetry. Take for instance:

 What dim ancestral heritage is mine

That now awakens in my blood regret?

What destiny is this, what strange design,

That I must seek a haunting silhouette

In unremembered lands my dreams divine,

But cannot quite recall nor quite forget?

So, Howard or L’Amour? Note the words “dim” and “haunting” and “dreams,” words often used by Howard in his poetry and short stories. Just the mere fact the poem draws upon the author’s ancestry and how that is very important to him, shows the similarities between Howard and L’Amour. In this case, however, the poem is L’Amour’s titled, “I’m a Stranger Here,” a sentiment that Howard would no doubt have understood.

Here is another stanza from a L’Amour poem titled “The Gladiator,” with words Howard could identify with:

Mine is the glory of battle

Mine whose reward is to die—

Mine is the ending death-rattle

Without the one gift of a sigh;

Mine never the glory of conquest

Mine never the fires of a hate,

Mine only the pain and the death-rest—

A bowing to powers of Fate.

Even the meter of much of Louis L’Amour’s poetry, reminds me of Howard. Hands down my favorite of the L’Amour poetry, which is longer than most, is “My Three Friends”:

 I have three friends, three faithful friends,

More faithful could not be—

And every night, by the dim firelight,

They come to sit with me.

Again the meter, like Howard’s poetry, when read out loud, flows off the tongue. Oh, and just to note, the three friends are of my favorite type: the supernatural.

Conclusion

If someone ever discovered that Louis L’Amour was an admirer of Robert E. Howard and that when he was young, he read Howard’s tales, I would not be at all surprised. My enjoyment of both authors traces back to a strong similarity between their styles of writing. That style is explained by Robert Weinberg in the Louis L’Amour Companion, when he writes, “Much of L’Amour’s success was attributable to his style of writing. His novels were fast moving, entertaining Westerns with larger-than-life heroes and menacing villains” (p. 51). Louis L’Amour himself told Writer’s Yearbook about his writing style when he said, “Get into your story, keep it moving in every line, and never let your reader’s interest wane. You must bring your story to a smashing climax, so be careful to build gradually toward that climax” (Weinberg, Companion, p. 174). That style, so exemplified by Howard’s writing, is also typical of L’Amour’s writing, especially in his short stories, and makes them well worth the read for Howard fans.

I titled this article “Passing on the Tradition” because in many ways, perhaps, L’Amour took up where Howard left off. L’Amour was 28 years old when Howard died, and right before that, L’Amour was finally published in the pulps. It was not, however, until 1938, that he started to see some real success, and it was not until after World War II that he made a name for himself with his westerns, or, as he preferred, tales of the frontier. In another interview, L’Amour wrote about his early writing for the pulps. He explained, “I wrote pulps for several years and at the end of the time I was making a very good living at it. Then over-night they were gone like snow in the desert” (Weingberg, Companion, p. 151). Howard, too, was making a pretty good living (which would have been better if Weird Tales had paid him on time), for as he noted to Lovecraft, “I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer” (REH to Lovecraft, July 1933, TCL, Vol. 3, p. 82). Like Todd Vick wondered in his essay, if Howard had lived and continued writing western frontier stories, would he, like L’Amour, have made the switch to paperback novels when the pulp magazine industry died?

 

Further Reading

If you are a fan of Robert E. Howard, then I have some suggestions for what to read of Louis L’Amours (if you haven’t already done so):

If you like Howard’s Western Tales, you are in luck, for there are so many Louis L’Amour books to choose from. To get the closest to Howard, you would have to go with L’Amour’s short story collections. Some of my favorite, which are very Howard-like, are:

         Bowdrie, Bowdrie’s Law, Riding for the Brand, & The Riders of the Ruby Hills.

For novels (though they are typically short novels), check out the following:

        Hondo, Flint, Utah Blaine, The Quick and the Dead, & Last Stand at Papago Wells

If you like the Sailor Steve Costigan stories, then read the Ponga Jim stories:

       The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour, Vol. 4, Part 2 (which has them all and more) or West from Singapore (which is missing one).

If you like Howard’s Detective Steve Harrison stories, read L’Amour’s detective character Kip Morgan, an ex-fighter:

       The Hills of Homicide or you can get all of those stories and more in The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour Vol. 6.

If you like reading Howard’s only science-fiction story, Almuric, then read Louis L’Amour’s only one (although just to note, it really is more of a blending of a modern day western with the supernatural, rather than science fiction, but it is still typically dubbed science fiction):

      The Haunted Mesa.

If you like Howard’s historical adventures, try:

       Sackett’s Land, The Man from Skibbereen, & Comstock Lode (L’Amour’s longest novel)

If you like Howard’s autobiographical Post Oaks & Sand Roughs, read:

      Education of a Wandering Man

And, if you like Howard’s poetry, read:

      Smoke from this Altar.

Enjoy!

Will Oliver, in the words of Robert E. Howard, is just “some line-faced scrivener,” who has been a fan of the greatest pulp author since discovering him in 1979. He is a member of REHupa, has published on Howard in The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard, and is currently at work on a biography of his life and times.