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 most of the traditional, or conventional, elements that characterize popular Western fiction, they also contain a number of inventional elements that separate his fiction from the efforts of his less popular colleagues. For example, while the L'Amour hero is a tough, silent, and virile force protecting the interests of civilization that are constantly being threatened by the forces of the wilderness, he is also … in search of domesticity, of the family. (p. 13)

His development of a triad of families as a frame for viewing the settling of the West is a highly innovative element in his fiction. (p. 15)

[The] formal family groupings may well constitute the most ambitious and complex attempt to date to create a Faulknerian series of interrelated characters and events in the popular Western tradition. L'Amour seems to be able to create in his readers a feeling of belonging to a tradition; this in turn provides L'Amour with the basis for a popular, organic fiction that creates a familiar yet ever unfolding world within the formulaic Western world.

While this triad of families provides a formal structure within which the characters and events exist and to which the readers relate and refer throughout his fiction, there are also less formal family structures and images in L'Amour's works which provide the overall framework for an entire set of beliefs, attitudes, and values which characterize his fiction. The concept of the family is the thread that becomes the texture of his most successful fiction. (p. 16)

Whether the particular L'Amour hero is a pioneer, a gunfighter, a builder, or an intellectual, his value system is the same. For his qualities are those that built the West of the American imagination and qualities that define the fiction of Louis L'Amour.

The Female Principle receives significant attention in L'Amour's fiction because it is an essential element of his formulaic innovation of the concept of the family. A particular theme that receives repeated emphasis is the scarcity and consequent sanctity of womanhood in the West. In L'Amour's fiction there is no greater Western sin than molesting a woman…. (p. 17)

L'Amour's fiction moves towards the hearth and the implied social institutions with the same certainty evidenced by the lone cowboy in the well-known Christmas season advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes who drags his Christmas tree behind his horse as they move slowly, gracefully, yet surely towards the cabin marked in the snow by the warm, hearth-centered smoke pouring from its humble yet solid chimney. (p. 18)

While they embrace the hearth, the characters in L'Amour's fiction are at the same time quite conscious of their ties to the land, a conventional aspect of popular Western fiction that L'Amour enlarges by suggesting that the hearth is a second stage of development…. This hearth-modified view of the landscape adds the dimension of holding the land in trust for future generations to L'Amour's fiction. (p. 19)

The family is the protector of the law, moral standards, and social order. Without the family there is only the wilderness and its counterpart, savagery, a truth of which the Indians in L'Amour's fiction are keenly aware. For they, unlike the white man they often had to fight, would return to their lodges and their families after a battle. They considered their white enemies savages who wanted to fight family-less wars instead of family-centered battles.

L'Amour considers himself and his novels to be in the tradition of the oral story teller and his tales; he uses fiction as the vehicle of communicating with his ever increasing audience. But he considers his fiction a continuing epic of the American West that is a romance which combines elements of the West as it was with qualities of the West as it ought to have been. Despite the fact that he has sixty-seven titles in print, Louis L'Amour is writing one long tale with many parts, focusing on three families in particular and on the concept of the family in general as he unfolds the saga of the settling of the West. (p. 21)