Louis L'Amour is the best selling Western writer of all-time. The reasons for his remarkable success in the marketplace are many, but none seems as pervasive or as consistently developed in his fiction as the concept of the family in the West.

The families in L'Amour's fiction, for example, his famous Sacketts, are often uprooted and transplanted from Eastern Soil to the Western landscape with their civilized virtues intact. Their romantic, idealistic, familiar attitudes serve them well on the Western frontier where they work to establish a new world in which civilization can thrive. While on the one hand presenting us with the formal familial triad of the Sacketts (the pioneers), the Talons (the builders) and the Chantrys (the thinkers), he also presents us with the more general family unit as a measure by which all other values in his novels are defined. (p. 12)

While his novels have...