Louis L'Amour (March 22, 1908 – June 10, 1988) was an American author of (primarily) Western fiction (see also Frontier, Western movie, and Wild West). He was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore of French-Canadian background March 22, 1908 in Jamestown, North Dakota. The last of seven children to a veterinarian father and a teacher mother, Louis was an avid reader as a child. In the early 1920s, his parents decided to pack up the family and find better economic conditions. When he was 15, he got separated from his family in the American southwest and began to work a string of diverse jobs, which gave him ideas for his fiction. He continued to be an itinerant worker, traveling the world, up to the start of WWII. In the 1930s he began to sell stories to pulp magazines. After serving in WWII, he continued to write stories for magazines. In the 1950s, he began to sell novels. He eventually wrote more than 100 novels, selling more than 225 million copies that were translated into dozens of languages and made into 30 motion pictures.