Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family's frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L'Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner * of dead cattle, assessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers during World War Q. During Us 'yondering days' he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on die Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He has won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. A voracious reader and collector of rare books, Mr. L'Amour's personal library of some 10,000 volumes covers a broad range of scholarly disciplines including many personal papers, maps, and diaries of the pioneers.
Mr. L'Amour 'wanted to write almost from the time I could walk.'* After developing a widespread following for his many adventure stories written for the fiction magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in 1953. Mr. L'Amour is now one of the four bestselling living novelists in the world. Every one of his more than 85 novels is constantly in print and every one has sold more than one million copies, giving Hfm more million- copy bestsellers than any other living author. His books have been translated into more man a dozen languages, and more than thirty, of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, Mr. L'Amour in 1983 became the first novelist ever to be awarded a Special National Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life's work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.
Mr. L'Amour lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique.
