James Baquet

    I grew up in a reading household. All of my siblings are readers, and our love of books comes from our parents’ examples. Though my parents were pretty busy when I was a kid, they still found time to read. Not great literature, by any means; Mom read (and still reads) romances and historical novels, while Dad read westerns, mostly by Louis L’Amour (1908-1988).

    L’Amour grew up in North Dakota, playing “cowboys and Indians” and reading the boys’ novels of G.A. Henty, an English author who often inserted men and boys into historical situations where they could exhibit virtues like intelligence, bravery, and modesty — much like the heroes in L’Amour’s own novels.

    His milieu was the Old West, not that different from the places where he grew up. Most of his 100 novels and over 250 short stories featured characters based on the people he met as his family moved around through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and finally, Oklahoma. Some of the older ones vividly remembered the West “as it really was.”

    In addition to the virtues of his characters, L’Amour was known for his authenticity. Although his work is widely considered to be mere “pulp,” it was carefully researched, with few anachronisms or inconsistencies. It has been said, “If Louis L’Amour says there’s a rock in one of his stories, you can go there and find that rock.”

    L’Amour’s books were also well-plotted and exciting. He told this story about himself: One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter — who was a child at the time — asked me, “Daddy, why are you writing so fast?” And I replied, “Because I want to see how the story turns out!”

    They must have turned out fairly well. By the time of his death, L’Amour’s books had sold over 200 million copies, making him one of the best-selling American authors in his day.

    The money acquired from these sales allowed him to spend his later years in Los Angeles. He had planned to use some of it to build an authentic Western town in Colorado. Unfortunately, plans fell through, and “Shalako” was never built.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. setting, situation

    2. things that don’t fit

    3. humility, the opposite of arrogance

    4. failed to happen

    5. good qualities in a person

    6. things in the wrong time

    7. cheap books (and the stories in them)

    8. put into

    9. genuineness, reflecting what’s true

    10. brothers and/or sisters