Early in Louis L'Amour's career, he wrote a number of novel-length stories for "pulp" western magazines. "I lived with my characters so closely that their lives were still as much a part of me as I was of them long after the issues in which they appeared went out of print," he said. "I wanted to tell the reader more about my people and why they did what they did." So he revised and expanded these magazine works to be published again as full-length novels. Here is one of his early creations which have long been a source of great speculation and curiosity among his fans.

In Riders of the Dawn, a young gunslinger is changed for the better by a meeting with a beautiful woman. A classic range-war western, this novel features that powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West for which L'Amour's fiction is known. In the author's words: "It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes."

Louis L’Amour (1908-1988), born in Jamestown, North Dakota, began his career as a writer in the 1940s and became a best-selling author of more than one hundred books that were authentic portrayals of frontier life. More than thirty of his books formed the basis of films. In 1983, he was awarded a National Gold Medal by the U.S. Congress for lifetime literary achievement, and in 1984 he received the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the nation.