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160 Western American Literature Education of a Wandering Man. By Louis L’Amour. Introduction by Daniel J. Boorstin. Illustrated with personal photographs. (New York: Bantam Books, 1990. 258 pages, $4.95.) Here is the last book, a partial autobiography, from the master of the popular western novel, Louis L’Amour. Unlike most partial autobiographers, L’Amour concentrates his story on the books which helped him, a wandering high school drop-out from Jamestown, North Dakota, to become an educated man and successful writer. His many labor jobs in sawmills, lumber camps, mines and on merchant ships to Asia and Indonesia also contributed to his education—as did his ambitions to be a professional prize-fighter. (He won 51 of 59 professional bouts.) But his book here isreally about the books he read which opened his provincial mind to the vast panorama of man in the universe and world history. Though some WAL readers may scoff at L’Amour as a worthwhile writer, it’s a rare wordsmith who writes more than 100 books, who has all of them still in print, and who has sold more than 230 million copies worldwide. He must be awfully good at writing what millions of people enjoy reading. And this book is not so much an autobiography as an explanation of how he learned to be such a writer. The answer is, of course, through thoughtful and intense reading, and developing the desire to be such a storyteller himself; reading widely, heavily, continuously in the world’s literature, philosophy and history, despite having to work at many itinerant labor jobs across the West and on merchant ships across the world. His book, Education of a Wanderinng Man, is basically to show the scoffing literati that he really is a learned man, not just the latter-day Zane Gray, who has had 45 of his books made into feature films and televi­ sion movies. Since Louis came from a family that loved to read, as a young man hoboing around from job to job he read whatever and whenever he could. He kept year-long lists of the books and plays he read (as well as the poems he wrote and sent out) in the years of his youth. Though many of the lists are now lost, he has seven from the 1930s. These show that in seven years (usually while traveling, looking for work orworking full-time) he read 731 books and plays— almost all of Shakespeare, almost all of Eugene O’Neill, forexample, plus many great novels, books of short stories, non-fiction classics, solidbooks ofphilosophy and history and only one Zane Gray. (Of these 731 major works read, he wrote and published 70 reviews.) In short, through wide reading he educated him­ self in the classic manner. Hence the Daniel Boorstin introduction. This book is not literature but it may open our minds to the possibility of reading the pre-eminent writer of western novels in the second half of our century. Maybe he does know something about the storyteller’sart. Check your local newstand or garage sale for numerous titles. You might become a fan. STARR JENKINS Emeritus, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo ...

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