Jack Warner Schaefer (November 19, 1907 - 24 January 1991)[1] was an American writer known for his Westerns. His best-known works are the 1949 novel Shane, considered the greatest western novel by the Western Writers of America,[2] and the 1964 children's book Stubby Pringle's Christmas.
Jack Warren Schaefer was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Carl and Minnie Schaefer. Carl was a German American attorney. Both his parents were avid readers, and his father was good friends with poet/author Carl Sandburg. Schaefer read voraciously as a child; early favorites were Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alexandre Dumas, before moving onto Charles Dickens and Zane Grey, among others. He was to describe himself as a “literary nut.”[3]
In 1929 Schaefer graduated from Oberlin College with a major in English.[4] From 1929 to 1930 he attended graduate school at Columbia University, but left without completing his Master of Arts degree when the faculty there denied him permission to prepare a master's thesis on the development of motion pictures.[5] Schaefer's education included multiple courses on Greek and Roman mythology, which is thought to have served him well in creating the archetypal heroes that populated his Westerns.[6]
Following his departure from Columbia University, Schaefer went to work for the United Press. In his long career as a journalist, he worked as a reporter for the United Press news agency, as editorial page editor for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., and The Baltimore Sun, and as editor of The New Haven Journal-Courier.[7]
In his career as a journalist, Schaefer wrote innumerable news stories, feature articles, and opinion columns and thousands of book/film/play reviews and editorials.[8]
In the 1930s Schaefer worked as the education director of the Connecticut State Reformatory, and following his stint at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot (1944 to 1948), he worked in advertising and was a freelance writer before devoting himself to fiction.[9]
As a child Schaefer was an avid reader of Zane Grey and was fascinated with the old west. He later studied American history which formed the basis of many of his westerns.[10] In 1945 he began writing fiction after hours as a way of calming down. That year the story Rider from Nowhere was published in serial form in the magazine Argosy. It formed the basis of Schaefer's first novel, Shane, set in Wyoming, which was published four years later, and which was a great success.[11]
When he wrote Shane, Schaefer had never traveled farther west than Cleveland, Ohio. The Albuquerque Journal writer Ollie Reed Jr. wrote, “That Schaefer could turn out such a Western before he ever saw the West is a tribute to his dogged research, devotion to facts, and storytelling ability, all honed by his newspaper work.”[12]
Schaefer's other westerns included First Blood (1953), The Canyon (1953), Company of Cowards (1957), The Kean Land and Other Stories (1959), Monte Walsh (1963), Heroes Without Glory: Some Goodmen of the Old West (1965), and The Collected Stories of Jack Schaefer (1966).[13] For television, he co-wrote They Went Thataway, an unsold pilot that aired in 1960 as an episode of New Comedy Showcase.[14]