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Jack (Warner) Schaefer (1907-1991) |
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American writer and journalist, a master of the novella, whose best-known book Shane (1949) has been considered the ultimate achievement in creating a mythical western hero with a shady past. The story followed the pattern of a classical Greek tragedy, in which there is no escape from Fate. Schaefer's novel was adapted into screen in 1953, directed by George Stevens and starring Alan Ladd. "I guess that is all there is to tell. The folks in town and the kids at school liked to talk about Shane, to spin tales and speculate about him. I never did. Those nights at Grafron became legends in the valley and countless details were added as they grew and spread just as the town, too, grew and spread up the river banks. But I never bothered, no matter how strange the tales became in the constant retelling. He belonged to me, to father and mother and me, and nothing could ever spoil that." (from Shane by Jack Shaefer, Bantam Books, 1975, p. 118; originally published in 1949) Jack Schaefer was born in Cleveland, the son of Carl Walter
Schaefer, attorney, and Minnie (Hively) Schaefer. Both of his parents
were fond of literature, and his father was a friend of Carl Sandburg.
"Well, when I was kid I read more Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs than anything
else," Schaefer said. "Later I read Dickens,
Thackeray, and Trollope. I guess I used to read everything." ('An Interview with Jack Schaefer: May 1972' by Henry Joseph Nuwer, in Shane:
The Critical Edition, edited by James C. Work, foreword by Marc Simmons, University of Nebraska Press, 1984, p. 277)
Schaefer was educated at Oberlin College, Ohio, where he edited the
campus literary magazine, as his sister had done earlier. After
receiving his A.B. in English in 1929, Schaefer entered Columbia
University, New York, but left his studies when the faculty denied him
permission to prepare a master's thesis on the development of motion
pictures. "The thesis committee at Columbia just laughed at me,"
Schaefer recalled. "They said that the movies were merely cheap
reproductions of stage plays." (quoted in Jack Schaefer by Gerald W. Haslam, Boise State University, 1975, p. 6) Schaefer worked first as a reporter for the United Press in New Haven, Connecticut. His journalistic career spanned nearly 20 years, but between the years 1931 and 1938, he also served as the assistant director of education at Connecticut State Reformatory in Cheshire. From the mid-1930s to the the early 1940s, he was involved in editing and publishing magazines on films and the theatre. Schaefer was an associate editor and then editor at Journal Courier (1939-42), an editorial writer for the Baltimore Sun (1942-44), an associate editor at Norfolk Virginia Pilot (1944-48), and an associate at Lindsay Advertising Company (1949). In New Haven he was an editor and publisher of Theatre News (1935-40), The Movies (1939-41), and Shoreliner (1949). In 1949, Schaefer quit his newspaper job to write full-time. Several of his short stories appeared in various periodicals and other papers, such as Argosy, Bluebook, Boy's Life, Collier's, Fresco, Gunsmoke, Holiday, and the Saturday Evening Post. 'Sergeant Houck', originally published in Collier's, was filmed under the title Trooper Hook (1957) by Charles Marquis Warren, starring Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck and Earl Holliman. The title song was sung by Tex Ritter. Robert Wise's film Tribute to a Bad Man (1956), starring James Cagney, was based on Schaefer's short story 'Jeremy Rodock'. Narrated by a young man, it tells of a ruthless rancher, "a hanging man when it came to horse thieves", who is determined to get back a stolen heard of mares and revenge the rustlers' cruelty. The story was first collected in Big Range (1953). As a novelist, Schaefer made his debut with Shane
(1949), a tale of a gunman's involvement with a homesteading family in
Wyoming. At the time when he wrote the book, Schaefer had never been
west of Toledo, Ohio, but his vision was so clearcut, that his work was
honored in 1985 by the Western Writers of America as the best Western
novel ever written – thus beating such works as Owen Wister's The
Virginian (1902), Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage
(1912), and Louis L'Amour's Hondo (1950). Schaefer dedicated
the book to his son: "To Carl, for my first son, my first book." Shane
inspired George Stevens's movie with the same title. However, the
setting in Shane
at the Starrett's homestead was "about a day's ride from Sheridan", but
in the motion picture version was shot mostly in the Grand Tetons.
Moreover, in the film Shane wears his gun from the beginning, but in
the book it is hidden in the saddle-roll. Shane began as a short story and was then serialized in
three parts in Argosy magazine, entitled 'Rider from Nowhere'.
When the first
installment appeared, Schaefer's name was misspelled on the cover.
Revised and expanded, the work was released by Houghton Mifflin in book
form and recognized as a small masterpiece. The story of the mysterious
stranger is told from the point of view of a young boy, Bob Starrett.
"He rode into our valley in the summer of '89. I was kid then, barely
topping the backboard of father's old chuck-wagon. I was on the upper
rail of our small corral, soaking in the late afternoon sun, when I saw
him far down the road where it swung into the valley from the open
plain beyond." (Ibid. p. 1) "Call me Shane,"
the stranger says. Shane is the embodiment of the Lone Hero, someone who shares the values of the society, but has the destructive skills of the outlaws. Shane works as Joe Starrett's farm hand. A powerful rancher, Luke Fletcher, wants to run homesteaders off the range, and hires a gunfighter, Stark Wilson, to it. Wilson shoots Ernie Wright, a homesteader. Shane understands that Joe, who has became his friend, is no match for Wilson. In Grafton's saloon, he kills Wilson and then Fletcher, after the cattleman shoots at him from the balcony. Shane concludes: "A man is what he is, Bob, and there's no breaking the mold. I've tried that and I've lost." (Ibid., p. 113) After settling the conflict in favor of the community, he must hang up his guns, as does the hero of Wister's The Virginian, or ride out of the town – and he takes the latter way. Clint Eastwood's movie High Plains Drifter (1973), with its mysterious drifting hero, is closely associated to Shane, from the very first frame to the last. Schaefer sold his farm near Waterbury in the mid-1950s, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. From the late 1960s, he devoted himself to writing of mankind's effect upon the environment. Schaefer had already declared in 1961, that the Western genre is dead. In Mavericks (1967), the author drew a portrait of an old ranch-hand, Jake Hanlon, a dying cowboy, who discovers that he has contributed to the destruction of the west that he loves. Schaefer's own favorite novel was The Canyon (1953), in which the protagonist is a lone Cheyenne warrior, Little Bear, who opposes war and must take his stand between the customs of his tribe, nature, and the necessity of community. It was the book Schaefer wanted to write, in the assurance that it would have no commercial value. Monte Walsh (1963), filmed twice, starring Lee Marvin
and Tom Selleck respectively in the title role, chronicles the passing
of Old West and the American cowboy lifestyle. Constructed from loosely
connected episodes, the novel follows three close friends from their
youth to old age, and their choices when the hard times are coming. The
central character was partly based on a young man, who helped the
author's family with building and fencing their house 20 miles south of
Santa Fe. In the preface to the 1980 edition of the novel, Schaefer
wrote, "among our nearest New Mexican neighbours was a young man named
Archie West who to my mind was (and still is) in many respects,
certainly in appearance and temperament and cattle-country capability
and simple human decency, precisely my Monte Walsh." Of all of his
book, this was Schaefer's favorite. The themes of transformation, change, and learning a lesson in life, are brought out in several of Schaefer's stories. Although he never deliberately wrote for children, his novel's were increasingly popular with young readers. Old Ramon (1960), illustrated by Harold West, tackles the growing up pressures. Ramon, an aged Mexican sheepherder, initiates a young boy, the owner's son, into understanding independence and responsibility. Shabby Pringle's Christmas (1964), illustrated by Lorence Bjorkman, was a tale about a cowpoke, who substitutes for Santa Claus. In 1975, Schaefer received Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement award. Jack Schaefer died of congestive heart failure on January 24, 1991, in Santa Fe, N.M. Archie West read aloud the last pages of Monte Walsh, describing his burial, at the graveside service. Schaefer was twice married, with Eugenia Hammond Ives in 1931; they had three sons and one daughter. After divorce in 1948, Schaefer married Louise Wilhide Deans; they had three daughters. Shane (1953). Directed by George Stevens, starring Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, Brandon de Wilde, Jack Palance. The movie blended a realistic approach to the Wyoming range wars – a highly mythologized subject of the Wild West – and added to it many of the elements that characterize the Western film. A.B. Guthrie Jr., whose novel The Way West had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1949, wrote the screenplay adaptation. The film was shot in the Jackson Hole Valley, flanked by the Grand Teton Mountains. It was nominated for five Academy Awards: best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, and best supporting actor (Brandon de Wilde) and best cinematography – and Loyal Griggs took an Oscar for his cinematography. "Little Joey is merely one of many characters, and Alan Ladd is too much a gentleman, far more civilized than the edgy character in the novel seems to be. Whereas the novel focuses on character, the film focuses more on action. What the film misses is the mediation of character and events that the novel presents from Bob's perspective, but the older Bob has a better (though incomplete) understanding of the events than his less mature counterpart Joey in the film." (from Novels into Film: The Encyclopedia of Movies Adapted from Books by John C. Tibbets and James M. Welsh, foreword by Robert Wise, 1999, p. 201) A former gunslinger (Alan Ladd), wearing pale buckskin, becomes a hired hand and friend of a Wyoming homesteader Joe Starrett (Van Heflin), and shares an understood but unspoken love with his wife Marian (Jean Arthur). Their young son (Brandon de Wilde), named Joey in the film, is torn between his admiration for the blondhaired guardian angel and his love for his parents. Shane has a past he cannot escape, and he sees it in the black-clad hit-man Jack Wilson (Jack Palance), who even drinks his black coffee from a blackened pot. He would like to give up gunfighting, knowing that if he uses his gun he has no future in the civilized West. However, he is the only one who can stand against his diabolical doppelganger, hired by a greedy landowner. After the final shootout, Shane rides through a graveyard to disappear in the mythology. When Joey sees his distancing figure, he calls: "Shane! Shane!. Come back!" – In one of the memorable scenes from the book Shane and the farmer spend all day together to chop down a stubborn tree trunk. Stevens made sure that clothing and even haircuts were true to the period. Following the tradition of John Ford, the film had also a classical funeral scene, which can be compared with that of The Red River (1948) by Howard Hawks, or with a later example in Ford's Western The Searchers (1956). The people are grouped artfully; in the background stands the wall of the Grand Teton mountains. According to Stevens, the arrangement symbolized a continuity between life and death. For further reading: Writing the Wild Frontier: 200 Years of the Best Western Writers and Their Novels by Stephen J. May (2023); Characters and Plots in Jack Schaefer's Fiction by Robert L. Gale (2016); Listen All You Bullets by Sean Johnston (2013); The Golden West: Fifty Years of Bison Books, edited by Alicia Christensen; introduction by David Wrobel (2011); Western Film Highlights: The Best of the West, 1914-2001 by Henryk Hoffmann (2003); Shane by Jack Schaefer, notes by Frank Green (1994); West of Everything by Jane Tompkins (1992); Shane: The Critical Edition, edited by James C. Work (1984); Critical Essays on the Western American Novel, edited by William T. Pilkington (1980); Western Movies, edited by William T. Pilkington and Don Graham (1979); Jack Schaefer by Gerald W. Haslam (1975); The American Western Novel by James K. Folsom (1966) Selected works:
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