Louis L’amour was an autodidact’s autodidact. John Wayne called him the most interesting man in the world. L’amour spent the first couple decades of his adulthood wandering across the country, and around the world, doing odd jobs, and obsessively reading whatever he could find. Only much later did he become a famous novelist. Education of a Wandering Man is a quasi-autobiography, in which he describes the trajectory of his life, and the evolution of his thinking in terms of the places he traveled and the books he read.

L’amour spent years as a hobo, hopping trains from town to town, working various jobs. In each town he would visit the local library.

Its important to note, that unlike a bum, a hobo is ready and willing to work.

To properly understand the situation in America before the Depression, one must realize there was great demand for seasonal labor, and much of this was supplied by men called hoboes.
Over the years the terms applied to wanderers have been confused until all meaning has been lost. To begin with, a bum was a local man who did not want to work. A tramp was a wanderer of the same kind, but a hobo was a wandering worker and essential to the nation’s economy.

…Many hoboes would start working the harvest in Texas, and follow the ripening grain north through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska into the Dakotas. During harvest season ,when the demand for farm labor was great, the freight trains permitted the hoboes to ride, as the railroads were to ship the harvested grain, and it was in their interest to see that labor was provided.”

 

He also worked on merchant ships, and traveled throughout Asia and most of the world. He would find books for free or cheap wherever he went, reading 100+ books per year.  For example:

Byron’s Don Juan I read on an Arab dhow sailing north from Aden up the Red Sea to Port Tewfik on the Suez Canal. Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (Penguin Classics) I read while broke and on the beach in San Pedro. In Singapore, I came upon a copy of Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Vol. 1 of 3: Or the Central and Western Rajput States of India (Classic Reprint) by James Tod.

Although he didn’t have real formal degrees, L’amour understood the value of books and knowledge:

Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.
…Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and hopefully, in value. “

He wrote 89 novels, and clearly a lot of ideas came from paying close attention when he travelled:

People are forever asking me where I get my ideas, but one has only to listen, to look, and to live with awareness. As I have said in several of my stories, all men look, but so few can see. It is all there, waiting for any passerby.”
… for a writer, everything is grist for the mill, and a writer cannot know too much. Sooner or later everything he does know will find its uses.

As with reading, L’amour never let the challenges of a transient lifestyle interfere with writing:

“I began my writing in ship’s fo’c’sles, bunkhouses, hotel rooms- wherever I could sit down with a pen and something to write on.”

L’amour also spent time boxing in various small towns, and coaching other fighters. I’ve seen reference online to a 51-8 professional record, although I wasn’t able to verify it.

In the later years of his life L’amour spent more time in his personal library. His deep knowledge of the world gave him perspective:

Surely, the citizens and the rulers of Babylon and Rome did not see themselves as a passing phase. Each in its time believed it was the end-all of the world’s progression. I have no such feeling. Each age is a day that is dying, each one a dream that is fading.