|
Little did Louis L'Amour realize back in 1960 when he
published The Daybreakers, a novel about two brothers
who came west after the Civil War, that he had begun creating
what would become perhaps North America's most widely
followed literary family: the Sacketts. The stories of
ten generations of Sackett men and women as they forged
westward from tyranny-wracked seventeenth-century England
across the American continent have captivated readers
for three decades through seventeen novels with nearly
forty millions copies in print. The traditions and adventures
of this family of rugged individualists who stand indomitably
united when any Sackett is in trouble have inspired country
songs, a popular television miniseries starring Tom Selleck
(as Orrin Sackett) and Sam Elliot (as Tell Sackett), thousands
of reader queries--and now, a rare full-length work of
non-fiction by the worlds' all-time best-selling frontier
novelist.
In a 60 Minutes profile in which he hailed Louis L'Amour
as "our professor emeritus of how the West was won," correspondent
Morley Safer observed that "his plots may be fiction but
the details therein are fact." The Sackett Companion is
the author's long-savored opportunity to present the research
and probe the factors behind his Sackett fiction--novel
by novel--and to elaborate on their real and fictional
characters, their geography and locales, and their historical
eras in encyclopedia-like detail.
In this book, subtitled A Personal Guide To The Sackett
Novels, L'Amour takes us on a guided tour of his imagination
to introduce us to the never-before-told sources and inspirations
for these stories and the people and places that populate
them. He retraces some of his travels in which he has
walked the land the Sacketts walk, reliving such personal
memories as the street fight he had on a hot dusty morning
in New Mexico that ultimately led to the birth of the
Sacketts.
|
The
Sackett Companion
