Literary Criticisms
When interviewed not long before his death, he was asked which among his books he liked best. His reply:
I like them all. There's bits and pieces of books that I think are good. I never rework a book. I'd rather use what I've learned on the next one, and make it a little bit better. The worst of it is that I'm no longer a kid and I'm just now getting to be a good writer. Just now.
The critic Jon Tuska, surveying Western literature, writes:
I have no argument that L'Amour's total sales have probably surpassed every other author of Western fiction in the history of the genre. Indeed, at the time of his death his sales had topped 200,000,000. What I would question is the degree and extent of his effect "upon the American Imagination". His Western fiction is strictly formulary and frequently, although not always, features the ranch romance plot where the hero and the heroine are to marry at the end once the villains have been defeated. Not only is there nothing really new in the basic structure of his stories, even L'Amour's social Darwinism, which came to characterize his later fiction, was scarcely original and was never dramatized in other media the way is was in works based on Zane Grey's fiction.
But Tuska also notes "At his best, L'Amour was a master of spectacular action and stories with a vivid, propulsive forward motion."
Read more about this topic: Louis L'Amour
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