Born: November 19, 1907
Died: January 24, 1991
Ohio connection: Birth
Cleveland
Jack Warner Schaefer was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1907. Growing up in a house of voracious readers, Schaefer read everything from the exotic “Tarzan” stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs to the thrilling western fiction of Zane Grey.
In 1910, Schaefer’s family moved to Lakewood, Ohio. While attending Lakewood High School, Schaefer edited the school’s yearbook and submitted numerous stories to its literary magazine. After graduating in 1925, he attended Oberlin College, receiving a bachelors degree in English in 1929. Following his graduation, he pursued graduate studies at Columbia University in New York, initially specializing in 18th-century English literature. In 1930, when the faculty withheld their consent for his change in focus (the development of motion pictures), he left the University before the end of his first year.
In 1931, after brief employment as a rewrite man for the United Press news service in New Haven, Connecticut, Schaefer accepted the position of assistant director of education at the Connecticut Reformatory in Cheshire. That same year on August 26, he married Eugenia Ives. Together they raised three sons and one daughter until their divorce in 1948. In June 1949, Schaefer married Louise Wilhide Deans. Schaefer resigned his position in 1938 and subsequently spent twenty years working in various positions to include editor at the New Haven Journal-Courier in Connecticut, editorial writer for The Baltimore Sun in Maryland, and assistant editor at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. In 1949, unable to find fulfillment in the editorial essays he penned as a newspaper journalist, Schaefer decided to work as a free-lance writer. Dabbling in fiction writing for an evening’s recreation, he developed a viable story summary concerning a heroic, though weary gunfighter whose efforts to settle down with a homestead family are perniciously thwarted. The story would become his first published novel, Shane.
Published in 1949, Shane was an instant bestseller, so successful that Schaefer was encouraged to quit journalism and devote himself entirely to fiction. The book was adapted into a film in 1953. The next four years would prove to be productive for Schaefer, writing two acclaimed novels, First Blood (1953) and The Canyon (1953) as well as a collection of stories, The Big Range (1953). The Canyon, about a lone Cheyenne that is forced to choose between the customs of his tribe and the necessities of his community, always retained a special place within Schaefer’s affections. In 1960, he published Old Ramon, his first work of children’s literature. It was awarded the Newbery Honor Roll and was further distinguished in 1961 with the Ohioana Book Award. Schaefer’s other books included Tales from the West (1961), Incident on the Trail (1962), The Plainsmen (children’s literature, 1963), Monte Walsh (1963), Stubby Pringle’s Christmas (children’s literature, 1964) Heroes without Glory: Some Goodmen of the Old West (1965), Adolphe Francis Alphonse Bandelier (1966), New Mexico (1967), Mavericks (1967), Hal West: Western Gallery (1971), and An American Bestiary (1973). The Jack Schaefer Library, a collection of his papers currently housed in the Special Collections Department of the Oberlin College Library, includes numerous short stories, newspaper and magazine articles, and first editions of all thirteen of his novels.
Jack Schaefer died of congestive heart failure on January 24, 1991, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Awards
In 1961, Newbery Honor, American Library Association Notable book, and the Ohioana Book Award for Old Ramon. In 1975, Distinguished Achievement award from the Western Literature Association. In 1985, The Western Writers of America names Shane the best Western novel ever written.
Additional Resources: Wikipedia Article: Jack Schaefer