L’Amour is popular for all the right reasons. His books
embody heroic virtues that seem to matter now more than
ever. —
The Wall Street Journal
More unpublished works from the archives of Louis L’Amour:
complete short stories, partial novels, treatments, and notes
that will transport readers from the Western frontier to India,
China, and even the future.
Exploring the creative process of an American original, the
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series will uncover the hidden
history behind the author’s best known novels . . . and his
most mysterious and ambitious unfinished works.
In this second volume, Beau L’Amour examines how his father
made the transition from struggling pulp writer to successful
novelist and uses his father’s notes, journal entries, and
correspondence to continue the process of seeking out how and
why many of these never-before-seen manuscripts were written
as well as speculating about the ways they might have ended.
These selections include the beginnings of a post-apocalyptic
science fiction tale, a proposal for a nonfiction project
based on the life of Renaissance-era traveler Ibn Batuta, and
two chapters of a historical novel set in India about the
origin of L’Amour’s well-known Talon family.
At the other end of the spectrum are classic adventures, such
as “In the Measure of Time,” a chance encounter set on the
high seas, and a science fiction film treatment set in
Mexico, as well as seventeen chapters of a novel that
reappears throughout Louis’s journals and letters and speaks
to his fascination with post-revolutionary 1950s China,
leading him so far as to correspond with the Dalai Lama.
With rare photographs and commentary, this book further maps
the journey L’Amour embarked upon to become one of our
greatest storytellers and the diverse realms to which his
imagination traveled, making him a true American pioneer.
