"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More unpublished works from the archives of Louis L'Amour: complete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.
