Louis L'Amour

Louis L'Amour was an American novelist, born in Jamestown, North Dakota in 1908, who left school at fifteen and spent his twenties as a merchant seaman, miner, longshoreman and professional boxer before writing full time. He objected to being called a Western writer and called his books frontier stories. He wrote more than a hundred of them, insisted that every location and water source be real enough to go and visit, and had almost all of his work still in print when he died in 1988. The Sackett novels, following one family across two centuries, are the core of it.