It's Tuesday, March 22, 2022, the birthday of my middle child, Kelly Trygstad, a gifted educator and loving mother of three. She shares the day with Louis L'Amour, one of the most prolific writers in American history. L'Amour, who came into the world in 1908, was a wildly popular novelist and short-story author who wrote about everything from 12th-century pirates to tsarist-era Russian brigands in Alaska. But he became famous for writing westerns, and these books were the favorites of several U.S. presidents of a certain vintage.
Dwight Eisenhower gave Louis L'Amour novels to Secret Service agents; Jimmy Carter was immersed in "The Lonesome Gods," L'Amour's famous saga about the California desert, when the author succumbed to cancer in 1988. Ronald Reagan read "Jubal Sackett" in the White House and presented the author with two different medals -- the Congressional Gold Medal in 1983 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.
The first of these two ceremonies took place on the South Lawn at a barbeque for the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association. The congressional medal was an honor so rare for a writer at the time that only Robert Frost had previously received it. "The men and women of the Old West may not have been as slick as they were sometimes portrayed by Hollywood," said the old Hollywood actor, "but there was a certain integrity of character that shines through as we look back at them from the vantage place of history."
Whether one loves Donald Trump or loathes him, it was simply weird having a man in the Oval Office who was allergic to the written word. The 45th U.S. president didn't only eschew books (once said he'd never read a presidential biography), but shied away from reading newspapers -- or even one-page briefing papers. Joe Biden's reading habits aren't widely known, though he does read newspapers. And his speeches and public remarks are sprinkled with literary references ranging from Mark Twain and Langston Hughes to James Joyce. So that's something. But back to Louis L'Amour, who I've written about previously. In the White House ceremony honoring him, Reagan lauded L'Amour as a prolific storyteller whose 87 books, most of them set in the West, had sold some 140 million copies (that total is around 200 million today) and been adapted for movies and television shows. "He brought the West to the people of the East and to people everywhere," the president said.
Reagan couldn't immediately see where L'Amour was sitting, and when he asked the author to come forward, the president turned in the wrong direction. When he spotted L'Amour behind him, Reagan ad-libbed, "You sneaked up on me, just like Bowdrie." This was a reference to Chick Bowdrie, a Texas Ranger who sprang from L'Amour's ample imagination.
Such characters also emanated from Louis L'Amour's rich life. He quit school at 15 -- but never quit reading -- and took to the railroads, ships, and byways of this country, working variously as a ranch hand, longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, fruit picker, seaman, and prizefighter. As a U.S. Army lieutenant in World War II, he commanded a platoon of trucks supplying gasoline to planes and tanks in France and Germany, work even more perilous than the challenges faced by the lawmen in white hats he brought to life in his novels.
Through it all, L'Amour always planned to become a writer; and, as the New York Times noted in a respectful obituary, he was confident of his literary abilities. "I could sit in the middle of Sunset Boulevard," he once quipped, "and write with my typewriter on my knees."
He'd sold a few short stories before the war, mostly mysteries and adventure tales. Afterward, he picked up his pace and turned to westerns, hitting it big with a short story called "The Gift of Cochise."
Published by Collier's magazine in the summer of 1952, "Cochise" was read and loved by John Wayne, who bought the screen rights to it. The screenwriters fleshed out the story, and renamed it "Hondo." L'Amour was then encouraged to write a novel-length book by the same name. Its publication was timed with the movie's release the following year, and a franchise had been launched.
The speed with which the author produced books baffled his publishers, who strained to keep up with him, and even piqued curiosity inside his own family. One day, L'Amour recalled, as he was "speeding along at the typewriter," his daughter Angelique, then a little girl, asked, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?'
"Because," he responded, "I want to see how the story turns out!"
Worthwhile fiction depends on evoking such feelings among readers -- call it willful suspension of disbelief -- yet here was an author acknowledging that his story lines and characters had minds of their own. Perhaps that was one secret to their popularity. Despite his vast success (or, perhaps in part because of it), Louis L'Amour was underrated as a wordsmith. This perception was brought home 10 years ago when vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan asserted in his acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican convention that the Obama administration was "like a ship trying to sail on yesterday's wind."
To Louis L'Amour aficionados, this sounded familiar, and it was. Ryan's staff acknowledged that the line was inspired by the observation of an imaginary 12th-century pirate named Red Mark, who in L'Amour's telling observes: "A ship does not sail with yesterday's wind."
Nor does a ship of state.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.