Jack Warner Schaefer was born on November 19, 1907, in Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1929 and attended Columbia University before setting out on a varied career as a 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. Only in his early forties did Schaefer turn to fiction. He scored an immediate success with Shane, a novel the Western Writers of America honored as the best Western novel ever written. Schaefer now lives on a ranch near Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Schaefer has said that he likes to write about the West during the period when people were affected by the wildness of the land and the challenge of frontier life. This material carries a natural appeal for many young adults. While virtually all of Schaefer's...