By Tom Pantera
The Forum - 05/30/1999

North Dakota's two best-known writers tell stories of a uniquely American place, the West.

But they approach it from opposite directions. Louis L'Amour was a white man whose formative years were spent bumming around the world and soaking up experience. Louise Erdrich is an American Indian who writes about the modern line where the white and Indian worlds meet.

L'Amour was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore March 22, 1908, in Jamestown, the youngest of seven children.

When he was 15, his parents moved to Oklahoma. But young Louis preferred the school of hard knocks to formal education and began what he called his "yondering" years. He worked as a longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, hay shocker, miner and cattle skinner. He boxed professionally.

His wanderlust took him to the Orient. Legend has it that he paid for a trip to Europe with sunken treasure he found in Macao.

In the late 1930s, L'Amour returned to Oklahoma. He published a book of poetry in 1939, but when World War II broke out he joined the army, serving as an officer in tank destroyer and transport units in France and Germany.

When the war ended, he returned home and sold stories to pulp magazines. He didn't plan to become a western author, but found those stories sold best. He published his first novel, "Hondo," in 1953. After that, he produced three novels a year for the rest of his life, selling hundreds of millions of copies. He is the third best-selling novelist of all time.

He eventually published 88 novels, 16 of those detailing the life of the Sackett family, and 17 short stories. More than 45 of his works were made into movies.

L'Amour is the only American novelist to receive a Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He received the Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award, North Dakota's highest honor, in 1972.

He died June 10, 1988, in Los Angeles.

Erdrich was born June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minn. As a child, she lived in Wahpeton, N.D., where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs School.

Erdrich's mother was French Ojibwe; her grandfather was chairman of the Turtle Mountain Reservation and Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Band.

She attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., then returned to North Dakota to conduct poetry workshops sponsored by the North Dakota Council on the Arts.

She earned a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., and began winning honors for her short stories.

Her first novel, "Love Medicine," was published in 1989. It was about Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and won several awards. The editors of the New York Times Book Review chose "Love Medicine" as one of the best books of 1985.

Erdrich has published 11 books, including novels, a nonfiction work, poetry and, in 1996, her first children's book. She also has published six poems and two short stories.

She was married to writer and anthropologist Michael Dorris and the two published one book together, "The Crown of Columbus" in 1991. In the midst of an acrimonious divorce in 1997, during which Dorris was accused of abusing their children, Dorris committed suicide in a New Hampshire motel.

Erdrich now lives in Minneapolis.

A former North Dakotan was one of the best-known playwrights of the early 20th century.

Maxwell Anderson was born in Pennsylvania in 1888. His father, an itinerant Baptist preacher, up in Jamestown, N.D. Anderson graduated from high school there and enrolled at the University of North Dakota.

Standing 6 feet, 2 inches and weighing 200 pounds, Anderson played right guard on the Sioux football team. But he also wrote poetry and developed an interest in theater. He joined the dramatic society and wrote and acted in the senior class play.

After graduating from UND, Anderson earned a master's at Stanford. He taught English in Minnewaukan, N.D., before taking a job on the Grand Forks Herald.

After the Herald, Anderson worked on newspapers in San Francisco and New York. While working on the New York World, he finished his first play, "The White Desert." It was a critical failure.

With collaborator Laurence Stallings, Anderson had his first hit in 1924 with "What Price Glory?" a satire about World War I.

Anderson built a thriving career as a Broadway playwright. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for "Both Your Houses."

He also published poetry, essays and a dramaturgic study. He wrote radio scripts; was a foreign correspondent for the Office of War Information and wrote Hollywood screenplays.

He wrote 58 plays, 33 of which opened on Broadway. He died Feb. 28, 1959.

Two North Dakotans have made their reputations in romance novels.

Kathleen Eagle was born in Virginia and raised in New England. She taught on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation for 17 years.

In 1982, Eagle had been teaching on the Standing Rock Reservation for 10 years and was working on a master's degree at Northern State College in Aberdeen, S.D. She began writing a book set in the 19th century but based on her courtship with her husband, Clyde, a Standing Rock Sioux.

That book didn't see much success, so in 1984, she wrote a more contemporary story, "Someday Soon." It won the Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart Award that year. She has written 38 novels, including romances for both Harlequin and Silhouette, and has a new one coming out in July.

Cando, N.D., author Judy Baer has carved out a career in Christian romance novels and stories for teen-age girls and has written more than 60 books.

Raised in Leeds, N.D., she wrote her first romance novel in 1982.

She has produced two series aimed at teens, "Crystal River Daydreams" and "Live from

Brentwood High."

She also has written two nonfiction books, "Dear Judy, What's It Like at Your House?" and "Dear Judy, Did You Ever Like a Boy (Who Didn't Like You)?"

Her books have dealt with tough subjects like suicide, anorexia, homelessness, death of a loved one, racism, Alzheimer's disease and Down syndrome.

Not only does she exhaustively research each subject when she writes a book, she also includes in each one a note prodding those with problems like her characters' to seek out parents, clergy or other trusted adults.

Like L'Amour, another North Dakota writer wandered away from the state before returning to use it as a setting in his work.

Larry Woiwode was born in Sykeston in 1942. His family moved to Illinois eight years later and he graduated from high school and college there.

After college, he established himself as a writer in New York. From there, he moved to Michigan and Wisconsin, back to New York and then returned to Illinois.

He moved back to North Dakota in 1978. He now lives and continues to write on a 160-acre farm near Mott.

Woiwode has written eight novels, three of those set in North Dakota. He was named the state's poet laureate in 1995.

While some North Dakotans have made their mark in fiction, others have stayed firmly in real life, making strong contributions to journalism.

Eric Sevareid, a star at CBS television and radio during that network's glory days in journalism, was a product of Velva, N.D.

Sevareid was born Nov. 26, 1912, and started his career at the Velva Journal. He went on to the

University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis Journal, before attending schools in London and Paris. He worked at the Paris Herald for several years until the legendary Edward R. Murrow recruited him for CBS in 1939.

Sevareid broadcast from around the world and was one of CBS' star war correspondents. He once parachuted out of the plane over the Burmese jungle and lived with a tribe of head-hunters before coming out of the jungle on foot a month later..

He continued as a correspondent through the Vietnam war.

He joined the CBS Evening News in 1964.

For much of his time at CBS, Sevareid had a regular spot on Walter Cronkite's evening news show, providing calm and sometimes dryly witty commentary on the day's events.

Sevareid retired from CBS in 1977. He died in 1992.

Another North Dakotan got his start in small-town journalism before making it big on the national stage.

Edward K. Thompson, a product of St. Thomas, N.D., went from small-town newspaperman to founder of a popular national magazine.

After graduating in 1927 from the University of North Dakota, Thompson began his career in Carrington, N.D., at the Foster County Independent.

In the late 1920s, Thompson worked for two months as The Forum's city editor, then moved to the Milwaukee Journal.

Thompson joined Life magazine in 1937. He left there at the outbreak of World War II, serving as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Force and winning the Legion of Merit.

After the war, Thompson returned to Life, becoming managing editor in 1949 and editor in 1961. Life founder Henry Luce called him "one of the great editors of America."

In 1967, at the age of 60, he retired from the magazine and became special assistant to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, advising him on Asian affairs.

In 1969, Thompson founded Smithsonian, which has become one of the nation's largest monthly magazines. He was its editor and publisher until 1981.

Thompson died at 89 in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., in 1996.

Other North Dakotans have served with distinction at national magazines.

Era Bell Thompson, a child of the only black family in Driscoll, N.D., became a long-time editor of Ebony magazine and author of several books on her American experience.

Thompson was born in 1905 in Des Moines, Iowa. Her family moved to a farm near Driscoll in 1917.

After attending secondary schools in the Driscoll-Steele area and graduating from Bismarck High School in 1924, she spent two years at UND. She earned a journalism degree from Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, then did graduate work at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

She moved to Chicago in 1933, first finding work as a housekeeper. But in 1946, she received a fellowship to write the story of her North Dakota girlhood, a work published in 1946 as "American Daughter."

Thompson became editor of Negro Digest, then joined Ebony in 1947. She was co-managing editor of the magazine from 1941 to 1964, then international editor from 1964 until she retired.

During her journalism career, Thompson reported from Africa, India, Australia, South America and the South Pacific. In 1953, she traveled through 18 African countries for a book, "Africa, Land of my Fathers." She spent a night in a South African jail in 1957 because authorities said there were no hotel rooms for blacks.

Thompson died in 1980 in her Chicago home.

One former North Dakotan made his contribution to journalism not with words, but with images.

Stillwater, Minn., native Tom Abercrombie joined The Forum as a staff photographer in 1952. He moved to the Milwaukee Journal in 1953; a year later he was named News Photographer of the Year.

In 1956, Abercrombie joined the National Geographic staff as a roving photographer, traveling to Lebanon, Bermuda, the South Pole and the Himalayas.

During a 1957 South Pole trip, Abercrombie and six others were stranded for three weeks when their plane failed.

In 1959, he was named Magazine Photographer of the Year.

Abercrombie has traveled through much of the Muslim world, visiting Mecca in 1966 after converting to Islam.