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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.
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Sackett
Companion , The
