Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey: Two Western Titans

Key Takeaways

• Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour are the most successful Western authors of all time, even years after their deaths.
• L’Amour began by writing adventure tales and boxing stories; Grey began with fishing stories.
• Both authors sought out elderly Western legends, adding authenticity to their writing.

Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey, each of whom wrote 100 books in their lifetimes, were the Rodney Dangerfields of their respective literary eras: they got no respect.

Grey sold millions—by far the most Western books of any author in his time, but Owen Wister, based on a single volume, The Virginian, is called the father of Western fiction. Similarly, Louis L'Amour sold over 320 million books, but what book is considered the Western novel of his era? Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. The only people who truly appreciated—and continue to appreciate—L’Amour and Grey are actual readers and filmgoers.

The similarities in their storytelling styles are inevitable, given their similar quests for knowledge: both men researched and travelled the West extensively and intimately knew their settings and their people. Grey rode trails with famous and infamous characters like buffalo hunter-turned-conservationist C.T. ‘Buffalo’ Jones, and Yellowstone Game Warden Jim Owens. L’Amour, as a very young man travelling across the country with his family, his father looking for work, sought out elderly legends like outlaw Emmett Dalton, and two of Judge Parker’s greatest deputies, Bill Tilghman and Chris Madsen.

The details in their descriptions—especially rare in today’s “cut to the chase” approach—put the reader precisely, and beautifully, in the time and place, and among the people, that are described.

Both men tinkered with their names for professional reasons. Louis changed the spelling of his last name from LaMoore to the dashingly French L’Amour. Zane was actually Grey’s middle name, his mother’s maiden name, and he wisely dropped his first name, which was Pearl—the smartest change of its kind until Marion Morrison became John Wayne, who incidentally starred in Born to the West (1937) for Grey, and Hondo (1953) for L’Amour.

While the two authors would share many readers over the years, there was really no overlap in their careers. While Grey died in 1939, L’Amour had sold his first story, “Gloves for a Tiger”, just two years earlier, to Thrilling Adventures Magazine. Both men learned their craft writing for magazines, and neither wrote Westerns initially.

Grey wrote about fishing—sailing and deep-sea fishing were the two great passions of his life—and he would hold many records for his prowess with a rod and reel. L’Amour began by writing adventure stories and boxing stories for the pulps, having been a boxer himself. Grey was a considerable athlete as well—he was such a good pitcher that he went to college on a baseball scholarship. L’Amour had no such luck: his school education ended, and his life education began, when he dropped out of school after 10^th grade.

Happily, L’Amour had the encouragement of his veterinarian father and homemaker mother to pursue his writing career. Conversely, Grey’s dentist father was so disapproving of his son’s literary goals that when he found the 14-year-old’s first story, he burned it in front of the boy.

Perhaps they differed the most when it came to their personal lives. Both men married one woman—Grey for 34 years, L’Amour for 32, and each had several children. L’Amour had, by all reports, a fulfilling and traditional marriage.

But Grey, despite reviewer complaints of being too prudish in his writing, was something else again in his private life. While he was pretty hard on the Mormons in “Riders of the Purple Sage” with his startling number of long-term romances, he might have felt more at home as an old-time Latter-day Saint.

His wife, Dolly, was clearly a modern-day saint.