Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L'Amour

Author:Louis L'Amour
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780553899085
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

Often I am asked if any writer ever helped or advised me. None did. However, I was not asking for help either, and I do not believe one should. If one wishes to write, he or she had better be writing, and there is no real way in which one writer can help another. Each must find his own way, as I was to find mine.

My way may not be for anyone but me. In fact, I doubt it is. After many rejections I sat down on the porch one night where I worked, looked off through our growing plum trees, and decided that all the editors who rejected my work could not be mistaken. Something was basically wrong with what I was doing.

From my shelves I took several stories by O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and Conan Doyle. From popular magazines I took several that I had liked, and I settled down to study them, to see what those writers were doing that I was not. Later, I added stories by Maxim Gorky and Robert Louis Stevenson.

About that time I received a note from Professor Kaufman suggesting that I visit him at the University. It was on that occasion that he introduced me to a number of his friends and when I met Professor Walter Campbell, who also wrote as Stanley Vestal. (Sometime later he, in conjunction with a former pulp-fiction writer, Foster Harris, started a short course in professional writing, where I was to appear eight or nine times as a lecturer on writing the short story.)

Campbell had published a number of books on a variety of subjects, but most were connected with the opening of the West. He had written or was writing a biography of Sitting Bull, and as I had grown up in Dakota, where the Custer story was still on everybody’s lips when I was a child, we talked about it occasionally.

Although no one in Professor Kaufman’s group was making a living by writing, all had published books and written a good bit for the journals. Most of them also reviewed books for the same page on which my book reviews appeared. They were a friendly, easygoing crowd and I made some good friends among them.

Above all, they were writers, the first I had actually met.

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