"L'Amour, Louis - Sackett Family 11 - The Sky-Liners (a)" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

"I think of myself in the oral tradition--z a
troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in
the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like
to be remembered--z a storyteller. A good
storyteller."

It is doubtful that any author could be as at
home in the world recreated in his novels as Louis
Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could he
physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he
wrote about, but he literally "walked the land my
characters walk." His personal experiences as well
as his lifelong devotion to historical research
combined to give Mr. L'Amour the unique knowledge and
understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the
American frontier that became the hallmarks of
his popularity.
Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L'Amour
could trace his own family in North America
back to the early 1600's and follow their steady
progression westward, "always on the frontier."
As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North
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 II. During his "yondering"
days he also circled the world on a freighter,
sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked
in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave
Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine
fights as a professional boxer and worked as a
journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious
reader and collector of rare books. His
personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the
time I could talk." After developing a
widespread following for his many frontier and
adventure stories written for fiction
magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first
full-length novel, Hondo, in the United
States in 1953. Every one of his more than 100
books is in print; there are nearly 230
million copies of his books in print