"It was May 14. In a few days my class back in Jamestown, North Dakota would be graduating from high school, and I was in Singapore."

With these words, Louis L'Amour introduces Education of a Wandering Man, his memoir that traces his self-education as he pursued it around the globe. Although he left home at the age of fifteen before finishing high school, L'Amour pursued his own destiny to become one of the world's most popular writers. His achievements were even more remarkable in light of the obstacles that he overcame to achieve his success. He had little formal education, never graduated from high school, spent much of his youth wandering from job to job, and was over forty by the time he published his first novel. Still, he sold more books than nearly every other contemporary novelist. He wrote more million-copy bestsellers than any other American fiction writer...