Education of a Wandering Man

Louis L'Amour finished this memoir of his lifelong love of learning shortly before his death in 1988. He recalls growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, with parents who instilled a love of words, printed and spoken, and his decision to leave school at fifteen and treat the world as his classroom. He went on to skin cattle in Texas, look after a mine, work as a roustabout in a circus, box in small-town prizefights, ride the Southern Pacific as a hobo and ship out as a merchant seaman to the West Indies, England and Singapore, always with books in his pockets. The account also includes a desperate two-day trek across the Mojave Desert.

Marvin Liao said that as a teenager in high school, grieving his grandfather and lost about his direction, he retreated into books, and this memoir and The Walking Drum were the ones that stuck with him and lifted his spirits.