BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… POETRY & FISTS. “Levitt’s swinging right caught him by the cheek-bone and he staggered, driven back by the force of the larger man’s onslaught.” — Louis L’Amour, Where the Long Grass Blows
L’Amour was “America’s Favorite Storyteller.” I know that because those words are printed on the cover of all his books. This book is small, as pulp Westerns should be, and thus easy to hold, published first in 1976, then 1988, and again in 1997. The dramatic Western cover art is from 1988, about the same year I started huddling next to the bookcase my grandpa had built especially for his collection of Westerns. If I tucked in between the bookcase and the dining room window, I could read whatever books I wanted, still listen to the conversations going on around me, and be essentially overlooked, all at the same time. It was a perfect world of both being and not-being, a luxury I have since lost after having become what my ego calls “a public figure.” My copy of Where the Long Grass Blows is special, although I can’t name the hero of the book. Just inside the front cover, in handwriting far better than it is today, is inscribed, “Happy Birthday, Grandpa Jim. Love you, Joshua Jim.” My namesake, my proxy hero, my grandpa.
“Louis L’Amour isn’t real literature,” my brother-in-law intoned, standing in that same dining room. The summer air conditioning rustled the curtains and sheers covering the window next to the bookcase. My grandpa had thoughtfully screwed a little rotating tie rack onto the side of the book case and — in good mid-century fashion — the rack included a brass plaque with color recommendations: which color tie went with which shirt, jacket, and sock. I stared at the tie rack and the books thoughtfully.
The tie rack fashion recommendations and the air conditioning were also thoughtful. After years of sweating in Iowa cornfields and cow pastures and Dakota plains and from the tops of under-construction high rises in Des Moines, grandpa liked to keep the house well air-conditioned. Grandma agreed. I paused. The idea that there was something wrong, something intellectually lacking, in his collection of books, had never occurred to me. As far as I was concerned, they were all good. And by that point, I’d read most of them.
It took something resembling 40 years to realize those books were something more than pulp fiction or lowbrow or highbrow or whatever brow in which one might be interested. They were, instead, a common language, a set of shared ideas. Grandpa and I didn’t talk. He talked, I listened. If I talked, he didn’t listen and that didn’t take long to figure out. But I’ve wondered at times why he was always such a hero to me. Not everyone else in the family felt the same. And it wasn’t until last week — mid way in a conversation about literature — that it finally dawned on me. By reading and loving all the same books, we had shared a profound thing. We never talked about it. I was young, had nothing of interest to say. But somehow in the ether, there was a set of precepts, of values, of people and places, of virtues, that simply were and we shared all of that in the most intense of ways.
I saw grandpa in a way that, in hindsight, not everyone else necessarily shared. I looked at black-and-white photographs of him when he was young, stocky, broad-shouldered, handsome, and usually close to horses. He was the quintessential cowboy in that he never wore cowboy as a costume. He was fully himself and that is uncommon, and also a product of his generation, a young man formed well before World War II. A cowboy, also a carpenter, a farmer, a labor union man, someone who could swear and still make it respectful, a man who never stopped reading, a man who could be mean and tough-as-nails when he wanted to, a man who could drink himself under a table when the mood struck, a man who ended a lifelong cigarette habit at age 75 simply because he felt like it.
Louis L’Amour, high brow literary author? Hardly. America’s favorite storyteller? Probably. None of that makes a lick of difference to me, to be honest. L’Amour was a household name for my family, but also more. He wrote a generation’s Americana, a great, wild American West full of men with virtue and muscle, men who rode a horse better, slung a gun faster, and punched harder than even the uncommon outlaw, men who were still underdogs and kept fighting anyway, and men who rode with Shakespeare’s plays and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England tucked into their saddlebags. Unrealistic? Is that really the point? L’Amour wrote with — in the minds of his willing readers — an earnestness that burned down ugly 20th century cynicism and charted a path to, through, and now beyond the cheap negativity of pop culture.
The American cowboy, all fists and poetry, is more than a jingoistic pastiche, useful and then thrown aside. He’s an American god made of strength and sweat and purpose, covered in dirt, down but never out, gilded in gold, not gold leaf but golden sunset, breathing the air of a free man. Just, as always, men were always meant to do.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2026
Cover art detail: Shannon Stirnweiss, 1988
