 | |
| Author | Louis L'Amour |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Western novel |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
Publication date | 1960 |
| Pages | 204 |
| ISBN | 0-553-27674-3 |
The Daybreakers is a 1960 novel set in the latter half of 19th-century America (1867), written by Louis L'Amour. It is the first novel that he wrote about a Welsh and English family surnamed Sackett. He later wrote five novels that take place before The Daybreakers. There are a total of seventeen novels in "The Sacketts" series.
Eighteen-year-old Tyrel Sackett must flee his home in Tennessee because he killed a man who was trying to kill his brother, Orrin, who catches up with him, and so begins their travels west, to New Mexico Territory, where “Spanish land grants are being voided by fraud”. [1] They face hostile Native Americans, Mexicans, and white men. They also make friends along the way. In Mora, Orrin and Tyrel start a ranch and bring their mother to live with them in their new home.
William Tell Sackett, their oldest brother is mentioned, and he is the protagonist of the following Sackett novel, Sackett (1961).
The trials and challenges of this world and the responsibilities of men. Good character traits, and bad ones. Literary scholar Harold Hinds Jr. writes that, “His heroes are independent and courageous, awkward with women, gifted fighting men, personifications of good. They are often as severely tested by Nature as by Indians, gunmen, thieves, and the like”. [2] The Daybreakers is really no exception to this norm. L'Amour once remarked, "I’m actually writing history. It isn’t what you’d call big history. I don’t write about presidents and generals...I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country." [3]
Harold Hinds Jr. takes a wide look at Louis L'Amour's fiction and asserts, “L’Amour’s immense popularity rests on his superb storytelling and on his ability to write masterfully within the tradition of the popular American Western . . . The typical Western is an action-packed thriller set in the American West between 1865 and 1890. To create a sense of authenticity, considerable attention is paid to folklore, local color, and regionalism.” (130). "Popular" Western novels (rather than literary Western novels, such as Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, or True Grit by Charles Portis) are well-known to be formulaic, but Hinds says, “Yet L’Amour does deviate, often quite creatively, from the standard Western formula. His novels are remarkable for their authentic settings and attention to historical detail” [4]
Bruce Weber writes for L'Amour's New York Times obituary, "L’Amour’s prose does not, of course, rival Proust's, nor do his characters show too much complexity; the good guys and the bad guys are pretty clear from the beginning. But the plots are more or less irresistible...." [5]
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but it also includes literature produced in the United States in languages other than English.
Louis Dearborn L'Amour was an American novelist and short story writer. His books consisted primarily of Western novels, though he called his work "frontier stories". His most widely known Western fiction works include Last of the Breed, The Walking Drum, Hondo, Shalako, and the Sackett series. L'Amour also wrote historical fiction, science fiction, non-fiction (Frontier), and poetry and short-story collections. Many of his stories were made into films. His books remain popular and most have gone through multiple printings. At the time of his death, almost all of his 105 existing works were still in print, and he was "one of the world's most popular writers".
Louis Stanton Auchincloss was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a novelist who parlayed his experiences into books exploring the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. His dry, ironic works of fiction continue the tradition of Henry James and Edith Wharton. He wrote his novels initially under the name Andrew Lee, the name of an ancestor who cursed any descendant who drank or smoked.
Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 20th century and Louis L'Amour from the mid-20th century. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the popularity of televised Westerns such as Bonanza. Readership began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s and reached a new low in the 2000s. Most bookstores, outside a few west American states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books.
Catlow is a 1971 American Western film, based on a 1963 novel of the same name by Louis L'Amour. It stars Yul Brynner as a renegade outlaw determined to pull off a Confederate gold heist. It co-stars Richard Crenna and Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy mentioned this film in both of his autobiographies because it gave him a chance to break away from his role as Spock on Star Trek. He mentioned that the time he made the film was one of the happiest of his life, even though his part was rather brief. The film contains a lot of tongue-in-cheek and sardonic humor, especially between Brynner and Crenna's characters.
Ana Alicia Ortiz Torres is a Mexican-American former actress who performed in theatre and on television. After getting her television start by spending a year on the daytime soap-opera Ryan's Hope, she gained international recognition for her role as scheming vineyard heiress Melissa Agretti on the long-running primetime soap opera Falcon Crest which she portrayed for seven seasons from 1982 until 1988. She has also performed in few single episode guest-starring roles on various televisions shows or in television movies most years from the late-1970s to the mid-1990s.
Or(r)in is an anglicised spelling of the Irish given name Odhrán, historically spelled Oḋrán.
Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic historical novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified under the Western, or sometimes the anti-Western, genre. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.
Mora or Santa Gertrudis de lo de Mora is a census-designated place in, and the county seat of, Mora County, New Mexico. It is located about halfway between Las Vegas and Taos on Highway 518, at an altitude of 7,180 feet. The Republic of Texas performed a semi-official raid on Mora in 1843. Two short battles of the Mexican–American War were fought in Mora in 1847, where U.S. troops eventually defeated the Hispano and Puebloan militia, effectively ending the Taos Revolt in the Mora Valley. The latter battle destroyed most of the community, necessitating its re-establishment.
The Sackett family is a fictional American family featured in a number of western novels, short stories and historical novels by American writer Louis L'Amour.
Jeff Osterhage is an American film and television actor from Columbus, Indiana. He graduated from North Farmington High School, Farmington Hills, Michigan, and Western Michigan University with a BBA Degree (1976).
Chick Bowdrie is a character depicted in numerous Western short stories authored by writer Louis L'Amour.
Sackett's Wells is a former settlement in Imperial County, California. It was located 3 miles (4.8 km) west northwest of Plaster City, in or near Coyote Wash.
The Burning Hills is a 1956 American CinemaScope Western directed by Stuart Heisler and starring Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood, based on a 1956 novel by Louis L'Amour.
The Shadow Riders is a 1982 American Western television film directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and starring Tom Selleck, Sam Elliott, Dominique Dunne, and Katharine Ross. Based on the 1982 novel of the same name by Louis L'Amour, the film is about two brothers who meet up after fighting on opposite sides of the Civil War and return home only to find their siblings kidnapped by ruthless raiders. Together they set out on an adventure to rescue their family. The film reunites actors Selleck, Elliot, and Jeff Osterhage, who also starred in the 1979 film The Sacketts. The Shadow Riders first aired in the United States on Tuesday, September 28, 1982.
The Sacketts is a 1979 American made-for-television Western film directed by Robert Totten and starring Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck, Jeff Osterhage, and Glenn Ford. Based on the novels The Daybreakers (1960) and Sackett (1961) by Louis L'Amour, the film recounts the story of the Sackett brothers in 1869 who leave their Tennessee home and start a new life together in Santa Fe.
The Strater Hotel, in Durango, Colorado, is a historical hotel that opened in 1887 at the height of the American Gilded Age. Among its notable guests throughout its history are President Gerald Ford, Will Rogers, writer Louis L’Amour, the Grateful Dead, and astronauts from the Apollo missions.