Louis L’Amour Story: My Dad and a Typewriter, by Beau L’Amour

Beau L’Amour is an author, art director and editor. He has also worked in the film, television, magazine and recording industries. Since 1988 he has been the manager of the estate of his father.

I have no idea of how we were trained, my sister and I, but we knew how to approach my father if he was working and we wanted his attention. We would enter his office picking our way through the piles of books and papers. We would stand to one side of him, just within his peripheral vision, and silently wait while he worked.  Sometimes he would lift his fingers from the keys and say, “Just a minute.”  Then he would go on and complete a thought or get himself to a place in the story that would remind him what he had been intending to say next. Then he was yours…

…for about ten minutes. Before long, you would see the story or some innate discipline calling him back. We never had to worry about interrupting him because, while he was happy to be briefly distracted, he guarded his work time very carefully, and it never occurred to us that he might behave in a different way. “You run along now, I have to get back to work.” He would lean forward then, hunting and pecking at the keyboard, back in the story and perfectly in tune with where he had left off. It seemed as if he always knew exactly where he was going and no interruption could confuse him or even make him pause for very long.*

*L’Amour, B. (2017) Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures Volume 1, xx.

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Louis L’Amour Story: Louis L’Amour and the University of Jamestown

Phyllis Bratton, University of Jamestown,  Raugust Library Director

Shortly after Louis L’Amour’s death, Kathy L’Amour gave the University of Jamestown’s Raugust Library copies of all of his books, and continued to do so for many years after his death, as more were found among his papers and published.  In this gift, she included many translations of his works.

As a result, Raugust Library holds 387 volumes of his work, 189 of them in a language other than English.  These include Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Czech, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Greek, Hungarian, Slovak, Dutch, Hebrew, and Slovenian.  This might be the largest collection of his works in foreign languages in the world, outside of the Library of Congress!

Mrs. L’Amour also gave Raugust Library a set of his bound works in English.  For many years, these were on display with pictures and articles about him in the library’s lobby.  Now, they are housed in the “Listening Room”, where students go to watch DVDs and to use other audio/visual technology.  Library staff added western pictures and photographs to the room to enhance the theme.

Raugust Library welcomes residents of Stutsman County to use our collections.  Library cards are available and users may check out a limited number of items.  We have only two main restrictions:  we do not do interlibrary loan, and we ask that people in the community not come during exam week, as we are very busy helping students finish their semester.