Jack Warner Schaefer was born on November 19, 1907, in Cleveland, Ohio, an unlikely birthplace for a writer primarily concerned with the history and characters of the American West.

He received a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1929 and attended Columbia University in New York City before beginning a varied career as a United Press reporter, an educator in the Connecticut State Reformatory, an editor for a series of eastern newspapers, and finally an associate in a New Haven, Connecticut, advertising agency. Schaefer did not turn to free-lance writing until he was in his early forties, but he scored an immediate success with his first novel, Shane, most of which was written in Norfolk, Virginia.

That novel, perhaps the most famous and most celebrated of all westerns, had a difficult birth. Schaefer submitted an early version of the book to Argosy magazine, but he forgot to...