HOW THE WEST WAS WON
While it is often billed as a novel by Louis L'Amor, the designation is purposely misleading. In reality, How The West Was Won was originally conceived as a series of Life magazine articles published in 1959. Those articles consisted of photos and allegedly true vignettes pertaining to the expansion and settling of the wild west.

However, How The West Was Won became a millstone around L'Amour's neck. His obsession with portraying the West as it really was came into direct conflict with Hollywood's version of the West as portrayed in the screenplay. There were action scenes (a wagon train trying to outrun marauding Indians while leaden down with a literal tin of supplies and goods), L'Amour saw as ridiculous. Others he knew were physically impossible (crawling from the couplings between train cars to the rails below). And there were relationship connections between western characters that did not and could not exist (mountain men did not live in respectful harmony with most Indian tribes).
As L'Amour wrote his way around these problems, he was forced time and again to prove his version of the facts to the movie's producers, who frankly didn't care. There were also constant requests for rewrites as the script changed on the fly while filming was underway. L'Amour's irritation with the project grew exponentially with each clash. However, despite its rocky gestation, L'Amour's version of How The West Was Won would become one of the bestselling novelizations of all time.

L'Amour succeed against the odds in taking the episodic, uneven, nature of the film and expanded upon every scene (especially in the later chapters of the novelization), imbuing the final product with an epic reality going far beyond the realm of the typical novelization.
Twice as long as any of his previous works, L'Amour's version of How The West Was Won is a true a hybrid—part novelization, part original novel—with a depth of character and story that would easily make the uninformed believe the novelization was actually the source material for the film instead of the other way around. Still in print today and continuing to sell steadily, the success and popularity of the novel version of How The West Was Won has long outlived its celluloid genesis.
*While How The West Was Won is L'Amour's only credited novelization, a number of his novels are novelizations of screenplays inspired by his own short stories and film treatments. Hondo is the most (in)famous but Beau L'Amour, in his afterword to the Lost Treasures edition of Kid Rodelo, cites that novel & several others as examples.
Excellent review, Paul. I once worked for Louis L'Amour's British publisher who described Louis as 'a gentleman.'
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