10.28.25
by

Early Introduction

Being the fourth part of a seven-part series based on Your New Favorite Writer’s recent WWA workshop “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One.”

I can’t tell you how to write a great beginning. But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:

  1. Engage the reader immediately.
  2. Do not drown the reader in information. 
  3. Introduce important characters and plots early. 
  4. Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative. 
  5. Shape early action toward later plot points.

This week, let’s look at the third Big Idea: Introduce important characters and plots early. 

Why?

The opening is the most important part of your book for engaging readers and getting them to read the whole book. The main characters and plots are the heart and substance of your story. If they don’t show up early on, the opening is cheated, the characters and plots are cheated, the reader is cheated, and you the author are cheated.

Important Characters

The important characters are the major characters: protagonist, antagonist, leading allies of the protagonist or antagonist, and operational or catalyst characters who trigger main plot points.

The Protagonist makes the story happen. The protagonist is motivated by deep desire and takes actions to realize that desire. The protagonist should be front and center in your opening and, above all, should do something. A protagonist who simply reflects on what is happening, or who meekly follows an agenda set by someone else, may be the leading cause of readers dozing off. The Protagonist must protag.

The Big Bad Wolf. Disney Pictures. Fair use.

The protagonist is not necessarily a good guy. Think of the Big Bad Wolf in the tale about the Three Little Pigs. It’s the hungry wolf who makes the story happen. His fondness for pork is the root of all action. We may not want him to achieve his desire, but we are deeply invested in the question of whether or not he does.

The Antagonist is the chief obstacle to the protagonist’s quest. The antagonist may be an impersonal force, as in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. More commonly, the antagonist is a person whose interests collide with those of the protagonist. If the protagonist is a good guy, then the antagonist is a villain. Or if, as in “The Three Little Pigs,” the protagonist is a villain, then the antagonist—the wise and doughty little pig who built with bricks—is a hero.

Both protagonist and antagonist have allies or helpers. Some of those allies are minor characters, but the chief allies are major characters. A hero’s allies we call sidekicks; a villain’s allies are henchmen. If one or two of these will play important roles, they should appear in the early pages—at least before the beginning of Act II*, when your story shifts into high gear. 

*It is very useful to know something of traditional three-act story structure. I recommend Syd Field’s book, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, a simple, straightforward introduction to story structure. It applies to prose fiction or narrative nonfiction just as much as to movie scripts. 

Uncle Billy realizing he is about to kick the movie into Act III. Paramount Pictures. Fair use.

Important Catalysts—characters who may not be main plot drivers but who do something that injects a key plot point—should also be introduced early. Is a catalyst character is important? Well, how important is that character’s action to the plot? Think of Uncle Billy, portrayed by Thomas Mitchell in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, which almost everyone has seen. Uncle Billy doesn’t do much in the film, except at a key point his action or inaction triggers the major crisis of the story. I won’t say more, in case you are the one person who has never seen the film and you still want to be surprised. Suffice it to say that Uncle Billy’s one major contribution to the plot occurs rather late. It’s really, I believe, the thing that kicks Act II into Act III. But because that contribution is critical, director Frank Capra makes sure we know who Uncle Billy is, and what kind of a person he is, by giving him little bits of business that build his character all through the movie, from Act I on. 

Go thou and do likewise, Gentle Reader.

Important Plots

All stories, or almost all stories, have a Main Plot, also called “the A Plot.” If you cannot discern a main plot, it’s either a failed story or an “experimental” narrative. You probably want to have nothing to do with either. You probably want your story to have a clearly delineated main plot. 

The length of the main plot defines the duration of the story. The main plot shows up early by definition. It is that sequence of causally-related events that reflects the struggles of the protagonist and the counter-moves of the antagonist, and that results in the protagonist getting his or her desire, or not. If a plot does not start to show its face in Act I, it’s not the main plot. 

Most good stories also have one or more Secondary Plots, sometimes called subplots, sometimes referred to as “B Plot,” “C Plot,” and so forth. These plots involve secondary, but still important, characters; or they involve another aspect of the protagonist’s quest. Secondary plots develop alongside the main plot, complement it, sometimes mirror it, and add interest and complexity. Think of a romantic comedy. The main plot brings the leading romantic characters together; and there’s almost always a subplot that unites the secondary romantic characters. 

Such plots, like the main plot, tend to last throughout the story. They start early, usually in the first act, and are often resolved along with the main plot in a sort of neat bundle. For example, the main romantic couple and the secondary romantic couple may celebrate a double wedding. Check Shakespeare.

There is no rule about secondary plots, but most good stories will have one, two, or three that stand out. That is, a B plot, a C plot, maybe even a D plot. These develop in tandem, weave around one another, and add to the strength and meaning of the main plot. For example, the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man all have secondary plots alongside Dorothy’s main plot in The Wizard of Oz.

There are smaller subplots—but enough with the capital letters, already! These minor subplots may involve a minor character and last for a brief time. They may intersect with a key part of the main plot, like Uncle Billy’s fateful action late in It’s a Wonderful Life. Or maybe they may be a brief distraction—comic relief, for example—in the otherwise long, unrelieved tension of the second act. When one of these little bitty subplots works well, and stays within its limits, it is like the sparkle on a diamond. 

Next week: Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

10.21.25
by

Information Overload

Being the third part of a seven-part series based on Your New Favorite Writer’s recent WWA workshop “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One.”

I can’t tell you how to write a great beginning. But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:

  1. Engage the reader immediately.
  2. Do not drown the reader in information. 
  3. Introduce important characters and plots early. 
  4. Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative. 
  5. Shape early action toward later plot points.

This week, let’s look at the second Big Idea: Do not drown the reader in information.

The Urge to Explain

We are goaded by the urge to explain. It shows plainly in the writings of neophytes. Seasoned writers control the urge. At least, they’d better. 

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: The reader must have information in order to understand the story. But we, the writer, have a devil of a time figuring out just which information is really needed. To include anything else hinders the narrative art.

We don’t trust ourselves. We so fear not being understood that we pour all our energies into pre-writing. We write down everything we think the reader might wish to know before we unleash the actual story. 

Dear Reader, this is just backwards from how things should be. The reader does not need to know much—at least, not before you’ve given him or her cause to care what happens.

You must provide information, but if you give too much, too soon, or the wrong kind of information, you stop the story in its tracks. You create a snag. 

Confusion

Let’s start with confusion, the easiest kind of snag to create. We don’t even have to try to do this; it happens automatically. This is not the result of giving too much information but of giving the wrong kind of information, or phrasing it in the wrong way.

Back when Your New Favorite Author wrote a lot of press releases, his boss used to say: “It’s not enough to write it so they can understand it. We must write it in such a way that nobody could possibly misunderstand it.”

That’s the requirement. But it’s easier said than done. The confusion we create by misguided diction and inappropriate syntax is invisible to us, the writer. We know what we meant. How can anyone take it any other way? 

We lack the imagination to spot the ambiguity in our own words.

There seems only one cure: Get someone else’s eyes on it, preferably more than one set of eyes. It’s a good idea to join a mutual critique group that meets regularly. Members read one another’s work and comment on it. Part of the value is artistic advice. Part of it is simply the fact that one’s colleagues may be completely baffled by what one thought one said. Only when your peers display their confusion do the scales fall from your eyes.

If you want to write well but do not yet belong to such a group, seek out one you can join. The Wisconsin Writers Association posts a handy list of about 58 such groups, all over the state. If none of those work for you, start a group yourself.

Over the Top

The other problem is that we provide too much information, too soon. We strive to put the reader fully in the picture before the story ever begins.

Consider your mental state when reading an encyclopedia article versus your mental state in the midst of a harrowing ordeal.

Reading a purely informative article, you seek a comprehensive bird’s-eye view of the subject. You’re in academic mode. You want to know the width and breadth of the matter—all the ifs, ands, and buts. You want to master it from above, from afar. You seek a scholar’s distanced appreciation of the thing.

In a life-threatening situation that requires split-second decisions and swift, unreserved commitment to a course of action, you are not given all the information. You focus on what you must do to survive.

The reader entering the world of a story needs to identify with a lead character and feel the action of the story as if from inside. Give the reader just enough information to get from page one to page two.

You can fill in a few details later, but never at the expense of immersion in the story.

Especially at the beginning, do not burden the reader with an information dump. There’s no point knowing that John is devilishly handsome or that all his money was inherited from a scoundrel grandfather until you have seen John in action and decided he’s worth following.

The narrator’s art consists as much in withholding information as in giving it. 

An Example

Consider this opening, from my novel The Price of Passage: From Norway to America,  From Slavery to Freedom: 

Norway

February 1853

Anders Gunstensen jumped up from his straw pallet, struck a match, and re-lit the oil lamp. What was the time now? How soon could he start for North America?

He teased open the gold case of the watch Grandfather had given him. 

At that moment Uncle Torgus burst into the barn with a great bang of the door. “Anders, you oaf—wasting my lamp oil in the middle of the night!” The old man swayed left and right. He smelled of hard spirits.

The cattle, accustomed to Torgus’s rages, neither lowed nor bellowed.

You may or may not like this opening. You may or may not want to read what happens after Uncle Torgus enters the barn and challenges Anders. 

But now consider this alternative opening, Dear Reader, from an earlier draft:

Norway—February 1853

Second sons were always out of luck.  

Anders, though born in the caul, was still only a second son. So when the Crown increased Øiestad’s school from one to two teachers, the new teaching job went, as if by Divine Right, to the firstborn son of the schoolmaster. Thus Gunder, not Anders, had become Father’s assistant teacher—simply by virtue of having arrived earlier. 

Father, too, had been second son in his family. That was why the farm had gone to Uncle Torgus, the firstborn, and not to him. Father was happier as a teacher than he would have been as a farmer, but poorer. “I had to find my own way in the world,” he said to Anders, “and you had better make up your mind to do so as well.”

Anders had gone, hat in hand, to Uncle Torgus and begged tuition money for the agricultural college at Holm. In exchange, he bound himself to a seven-year indenture. It was a brilliant arrangement: Anders would get an education and Uncle Torgus would get seven years’ skilled service from a college-trained agriculturist.

This kind of opening gives the reader a lot more information, information about Anders and his place in the world. But it does not give us Anders. 

The virtue of the other opening, the one we actually kept, is that it shows Anders wanting and hoping something, starting some kind of action related to that desire, and meeting a potential obstacle. The very next thing that you’re going to read is what Anders does to overcome that obstacle. Don’t you want to turn the page and find that out?

There is no point knowing who Uncle Torgus is, and how he came to be an obstacle to Anders, until Anders is acting out his story

All of those details about Anders’s birth and family and background eventually find their way into the narrative, but only in places where they do not interrupt the unfolding of the action. 

In a novel, there are plenty of words available to deliver needed information. So postpone each datum’s delivery until you reach the place where it is needed for understanding, or where it will have the greatest dramatic impact. When in doubt, put it off.

Front-loading exposition, even necessary exposition, creates an academic feel, a stance of distant observation. 

By plunging into action and dialog, you get the reader up close and personal with the characters. People—represented in fiction by characters—are much more interesting than dry facts, and the reader’s interest in the characters, interest generated by their actions and speeches, will prepare the reader for additional information when you at last see fit to provide it.

Next week: Introduce important characters and plots early.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

10.14.25
by

Reader Engagement

Being the second part of a seven-part series based on Your New Favorite Writer’s recent WWA workshop “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One.”

As mentioned last week, I can’t tell you how to write a great beginning. But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:

  1. Engage the reader immediately.
  2. Do not drown the reader in information. 
  3. Introduce important characters and plots early. 
  4. Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative. 
  5. Shape early action toward later plot points.

This week, let’s look at the first Big Idea: Engage the reader immediately.

Engagement

Sometimes the very first sentence is memorable and therefore remarkable. 

Marley was dead: to begin with. —A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

It was love at first sight. —Catch-22, by Joesph Heller

Call me Ishmael. —Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

More commonly, the first sentence is simply the most direct way to start a brief passage, perhaps a page or two, that leads us into a compelling story. 

It used to be common practice to start a story slowly and indirectly. Thus, Miguel de Cervantes:

Picasso’s 1955 rendering of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

In a village in la Mancha, whose name I do not care to remember, an hidalgo lived not long ago, one of those who keeps a lance on the rack, an old leather shield, skinny nag and swift greyhound. An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb, hash most nights, eggs and rashers of bacon on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, some squab added on Sundays—these consumed three-fourths of his income.  The rest went for a light woolen tunic and velvet breeches and hose of the same material for feast days, while weekdays were honored with dun-colored coarse cloth. . . .

Leisurely, you might say. 

Booth Tarkington

Or how about this opening, from Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, a popular middle-grade novel in the Misty Eons, when Your New Favorite Writer was a lad:

Version 1.0.0

Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog.

A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him . . . .

This kind of opening has gone out of fashion, under the dual impetus of cinematic experiences and the mad pace of modern society. 

Lucy Sanna

These days, the Done Thing is to start in medias res. In plain English, start in the middle of things. For example: 

The rain came again, harder this time. Charlotte pulled her knit hat tight, pushed up the collar of her gray wool coat, and stared through the chicken wire at the rabbits. Kate’s prize rabbits.

She entered the pen and chose a plump one, furry and warm in her cold hands. Its heart thumped like a tiny sewing machine. Charlotte brought it into the dim barn and stroked its fur until it calmed, trusting. She hesitated a moment—stealing from my own daughter—then picked up the butcher knife.

When she cut the jugular, the sewing machine stopped. . . . —from The Cherry Harvest, by Lucy Sanna

By adopting a deep third-person limited viewpoint and starting the story in the middle of traumatic action, the author engages the reader at a visceral level while also sketching salient traits of the main character—who is, in this case, both cold-blooded and conscience-stricken at the same time. 

The technique of starting in medias res may even be used to involve the audience in action that is no part of the story—as in the James Bond film Goldfinger. The initial sequence, with Bond electrocuting an antagonist in a bathtub, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Doesn’t matter: The audience is still recovering from the unseemly frying when we cut to a cool and collected Bond entering the office and flirting with Miss Moneypenny. 

Alternative Methods

There’s no actual Law, Dear Reader, that says you have to start your story in medias res. I do recommend, however, that you start in medias somethingus. For example, here is the way British author J.R.R. Tolkien began his fantasy classic The Hobbit:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it – and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

J.R.R. Tolkien, ca. 1925.

This is masterful technique. Bear in mind, Gentle Reader, that in 1937, when Tolkien sprung this book on an unsuspecting world, nobody had ever heard of a hobbit. It was a brand-new concept. 

In fact, most of his readers probably bought the book because the title intrigued them and they wanted to find out what a hobbit was. 

So, in his first sentence, Tolkien mentions both a hole in the ground and a hobbit. And then, in the second sentence, he begins to tell the reader about the hole!

“No, no, Mister author! Tell us about the hobbit! We want to know about the hobbit. Never mind the hole.” 

But Tolkien procoeeds unperturbed through a long paragraph about the arrangement, layout, and furnishings of the hole. At last he moves on to a little trove of information about hobbits in general, and about the family to which this particular hobbit belongs. And little by little, we find out all we need to know about the hobbit: He is risk-averse, and he’s about to have an adventure. 

At this point, Gracious Reader, what choice do you have but to read the rest of the book? 

The Hook

It’s what we sometimes call a hook. The hook is that we know Bilbo Baggins is constitutionally averse to adventure, yet the author assures us he is about to have an adventure, like it or not. And the author goes one step further, challenging us to figure out whether the hobbit “gained anything in the end.”

A reader would have to be made of stone to resist that hook. 

The hook in the prior example, Wisconsin author Lucy Sanna’s brilliant historical novel The Cherry Harvest, is somewhat different. We are drawn into Charlotte’s world in a very close and compelling way. We experience with her the slaying of a rabbit, along with the guilt that accompanies it. We understand, through the author’s skill at narration, that Charlotte has been forced into this dire situation. The rest of the novel is about the larger situation Charlotte faces and how she handles it.

A Whiff of Death

Besides the general advice to begin in medias res or in medias somethingus, I have one other little suggestion for engaging the reader immediately: Contrive to place a whiff of death somewhere on the first or second page.

Why is that a good idea? We would rather read a story with life-or-death consequences than one with less serious outcomes. We not only need, as Donald Maass suggests, “conflict on every page”; that conflict must have high stakes. Life or death. Nothing less. Otherwise, why are we reading this book?

It may be that the chronology of your story does not allow for an actual death, or even a close brush with death, in the first pages. Never mind. It is enough to include a sentence or phrase that reminds the reader there is such a thing as death. That will be enough. 

Lucy Sanna in The Cherry Harvest shows us the actual death of a small animal, foreshadowing very real risks of human death for the human characters in the novel. In Tolkien’s case, it does not suit his purpose to have a death occur in the first pages. But he does use the word “adventure,” which is a code word for “serious risk of death.”

That’s enough. Just something, that’s all you need.

Next week: How to avoid drowning the reader in information.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

10.07.25
by

A Bulletproof Beginning

Last Friday, I had the good fortune to present a workshop titled “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One” at the annual Wisconsin Writers Association Conference, held in Stevens Point. 

I say “good fortune” for several reasons:

  • I got paid.
  • I heard the sound of my own voice—sweet music to my ears, indeed.
  • Most of all, I was with 175 friends of the Writing Persuasion—folks who have an itch they can scratch only by setting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. These friends understand one another’s need. About sixty of the 175 attended my breakout session.
Some of my good friends relaxing just before my workshop last Friday.

A lot of people have told me they got something good out of it. 

So, why keep it to myself? For readers who did not have the opportunity to attend, I will try to encapsulate a 50-minute talk in the next seven weekly blog posts.  

Here goes:

A Bulletproof Beginning

What’s the big deal about a beginning? Why the fuss?

Aristotle, right, argues with Plato (strongly resembling Leonardo da Vinci) in this detail from “The School of Athens” by Renaissance painter Raphael (1483-1520). Public Domain.

Dear Reader, a philosopher named Aristotle said, about 2,400 years ago, that every story has a beginning . . . a middle . . . and an end. That may seem obvious, but apparently nobody before Aristotle thought to write it down. 

And nobody since Aristotle has gone much beyond that simple observation in explaining story structure. If you want to hassle me about Joseph Campbell’s/ Christopher Vogler’s Twelve Stages of the Hero’s Journey, or about Blake Snyder’s Fifteen-Beat “Save the Cat” structure—sure, let’s have that argument someday. But in the meantime, consider:

Of the three parts of a story, the beginning is most important. Why?

Because if your beginning is no good, no reader will experience the joys of the middle and end. They won’t stick around.

More so, if the reader is an agent, editor, or publisher considering your story for publication or film production. Typically, such mandarins want the first ten pages included with a cold query. But that does not mean they will read ten pages. 

No. They will read maybe one page. Or maybe just the first paragraph. And if that doesn’t knock their socks off, they’re done. They have a lot of scripts to read. You must earn your way to the second and subsequent pages. 

Most of all, the beginning is important because it establishes the conditions under which the rest of the story plays out. The break into Act II, the many twists and turns thereafter, the great change of color and tenor at mid-point, the swiftening action as you move into Act III, the exciting climax and final denouement—all are present in embryo in the beginning of the story. If they’re not, it won’t work.

Studio publicity photo of Billy Wilder and Gloria Swanson on the set of Sunset Boulevard, ca. 1950. Public Domain.

Billy Wilder—the great German-American film genius responsible for Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, Some Like it Hot, and many other classic movies, said, “If you have a problem in the third act, your real problem is in the first act.” If you go back and fix the first act, the third act will work better.

By the way, Gentle Reader, did you ever notice how many lectures, workshops, or articles about story construction for prose fiction rely heavily on movies for their examples? Here’s the reason: Owing to the format and function of film scripts, the screenwriter has nowhere to hide from the need for STRUCTURE.

A seasoned scripter can sit in a darkened movie house, discern the arrival of the Great Change at Midpoint, look at his watch, see that 58 minutes have elapsed, and predict—with dead accuracy—that the film’s total run time will be 116 minutes. It’s really that cut and dried. It’s all about structure. 

The beginning is the first great pillar of structure in any story, filmic or otherwise. That’s why it’s important. 

As I told my friendly audience last Friday, I cannot tell you how to write a good beginning. It’s your story, you figure it out. 

But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:

  1. Engage the reader immediately. 
  2. Do not drown the reader in information. 
  3. Introduce important characters and plots early. 
  4. Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative. 
  5. Shape early action toward later plot points.

Now, Dear Reader, go ponder these things in your heart. Come back at this time next week, and we will consider Point 1: How to engage the reader immediately.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.30.25
by

Writers

Who is a writer? 

What is a writer? 

How does a writer come to be?

Does a writer spring full-bodied from the brow of Zeus, like Athena? Does a writer rise painfully from the sawdust of the arena floor, like Eric Hoffer? 

Are writers born, or made?

These things have been on my mind lately, perhaps because the Fall Conference of the Wisconsin Writers Association is about to convene in Stevens Point. I am on the program, offering a workshop modestly titled “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Page One.”  I sure hope I know what I’m talking about.

But who are these people I’ll be meeting with? Folks a lot like me, only as different as different can be. You see, we all have our separate concerns and urgencies. 

I write about Norwegians, Greg Renz writes about firefighters, Bob Allen writes about fish, and Deb Farris writes about the promptings of the Spirit in the workings of her life.

So you see, we are all the same.

All I know is, writers write. 

Louisa May Alcott, the real-life model for Jo March. Public Domain.

We are those who write because we cannot not write.

Some, like Jo March and John-Boy Walton, scribble in notebooks from early childhood and sell their first work as teenagers. Others rumble quietly like dormant volcanoes, then erupt without warning in middle age. 

John-Boy with pen in hand. Public Domain.

My friend Greg Renz waited till retirement to novelize the experiences he had been processing over twenty-eight years as a Milwaukee firefighter. In those years, he told some of his stories informally on more than one occasion. 

I doubt anybody becomes a writer without a prelude of some kind. What warming-up exercises did Homer go through before composing twenty-seven thousand lines of dactyllic hexameter known as the Iliad and the Odyssey?

A Writer’s Odyssey

I, Your New Favorite Writer, set off on the yellow brick road of Literary Lionhood at age seventy. Notions long marinated in quaint bottles on the dusty shelves of my psyche spilled forth in written words, abruptly made manifest to all the world.

Like Jo, John-Boy, Homer, and Greg, I did not come to this calling completely cold. There was a detective story at the age of eight; a comic strip starring me as a cowboy, complete with sidekick, fighting bad guys; a seventh-grade essay on traffic safety, which won me a $25 savings bond—the first time I was paid for writing; plus news stories and feature articles for my high school paper.

In college, I became a radio thing. In the Air Force, I listened in on Chairman Mao’s flyboys and wrote down what they said—sometimes, even, wrote down what they meant to say.

Back in civilian life, after years of muddled career launches, I managed to burrow into the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs. This is the agency that oversees the state’s National Guard and its Emergency Management division. There, I served the adjutant general as a photographer, writer, and editor. 

When it came time to retire—and I was all for retirement—I still wanted to write. Some guys settle down to a life of golf or fishing or public service. I settled down to a last desperate effort to say what was on my mind.

I realized the truths I wanted to tell could best be told by fiction. Some say truth is stranger than fiction, but I think truth is the subject matter of fiction. There is no point in making up a story if it does not express what’s at the heart of the human experience. 

I found out it’s not all that easy. I’m still working on it. 

I’ve been working on it full time for almost ten years now. In that time, what have I learned?

  • I have learned you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to make any real money as a novelist. John Steinbeck said, “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” This seems a considerable understatement.
  • I have learned the Protagonist must protag.
  • I have learned that no matter what it is you ought to be writing, what you will write is what you are damned well determined to write, and that’s all there is to it.

Along the way, I have assembled enough words in a sufficiently plausible order to get two novels published—with the backing of actual, professional publishers—and am well along on the initial assemblage of words for a third. 

These marvels of modern literary science to not fly off the shelves and into the cash register of their own accord. Oh, no, Dear Reader: Each copy must be individually sold by the author in the flesh, at a bookstore or an arts and crafts fair. A few people might purchase them on the Internet, but those people are exceptions.

Go on, be an exception: Buy my books. 

But whether you buy them or not, rest assured I will go on writing them. 

I just can’t help myself.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.23.25
by

Way Out West, Part V

Here, after undue delays, is the capstone to my series about the Wild West—cowboys mostly imaginary, conjured up in the twentieth century to provide idealized heroes from the nineteenth. 

Wyatt Earp at age 39, c. 1887. Public Domain.

Unlike the fictional cowboys I followed as a child, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were real, historical figures. They were authentic Western lawmen. The most cursory reading of their eventful lives will show that their fame was deserved. 

Also unlike the fictional cowboys, Earp and Masterson did not cease to exist after the 1870s and 1880s. Both men lived well into the twentieth century, into the era of automobiles and radio and motion pictures. Each, in the new century, tried to package his own image. 

Though very different men, they had some things in common. Both were born east of the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War. Too young to become soldiers—though Wyatt tried unsuccessfully to enlist at age thirteen—they were drawn, by circumstance or interest, into the great American West in the years after the Civil War. 

Bat Masterson age 26, 1879. Photo by Robert Marr Wright, Public Domain.

Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were rough, complicated men with checkered careers. They gambled, operated on both sides of the law, and pursued affairs or common-law marriages with multiple women. 

They also excelled at law enforcement in the wildest towns of the frontier—places like Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone. Each man took part in numerous gunfights and showed himself cool and resourceful under fire. Their lives were hodgepodges of romance, self-interest, irresponsibility, responsibility, and violence. 

Bat Masterson (standing) and Wyatt Earp, Dodge City lawmen, 1876. Bat’s hand rests on the butt of his six gun, holstered for cross draw. Courtesy Jack DeMaattos collection. Public Domain.

Earp and Masterson were friends from their time serving together as Dodge City lawmen. They liked and respected each other.

It was remarkable they came through all their adventures unscathed. Masterson did walk with a cane, the result of a pelvic wound in his first gunfight.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, both men drifted into other pursuits—not instead of, but at first in addition to, law enforcement. After the famous 1881 gunfight at O.K. Corral and a flurry of retaliatory raids that followed it, Wyatt met up with Bat Masterson at Albuquerque and both men repaired to Trinidad, Colorado. There, Masterson became, first, a faro dealer in a saloon and later, the town marshal. 

Earp soon left Trindad for other challenges. Over the next quarter-century, the footloose Wyatt roamed the west, with his third and final wife Josephine “Sadie” Marcus, blazing his way through law enforcement jobs, saloon ownerships, gambling and sporting interests—he refereed the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey heavyweight championship fight in San Francisco in 1896—and mining ventures, including a flyer in the Klondike gold rush of 1898. 

In 1911, when Earp was 63, he and Josephine began living in Los Angeles part-time while also working a mine in the California desert. They continued that pattern of life until his death eighteen years later.

Since he spent time in L.A., Wyatt befriended actors and directors in the nascent Hollywood film industry, serving as an unpaid consultant on several Western films. He became close friends with cowboy actors William S. Hart and Tom Mix and with director John Ford. He exercised a formative influence on the young John Wayne, who met him at Mix’s ranch and by his own admission copied Earp’s walk, talk, and style. 

Wyatt wanted his story told on the silver screen. “If the story were exploited on the screen by you,” he wrote to William S. Hart, “it would do much toward setting me right before a public which has always been fed lies about me.” In 1925 he began working with a friend, mining engineer John Flood, on a biography. Unfortunately, Flood was a poor writer, and the project went nowhere. 

Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp, 1959. Public Domain.

At the time of his death in 1929, Wyatt Earp’s public reputation was smudgy, due partly to his ambiguous role in the gunfight at O.K. Corral and partly to a public perception that as referee in the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight, he had thrown the fight to Sharkey by an improper ruling. Only in 1931, with the publication of Stuart N. Lake’s extremely flattering biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, did Earp’s reputation begin to soar. Josephine, by hiding unsavory details about his life, played a part in this redemption.

In 1955, 26 years after his death, Wyatt Earp received the distinction of having his own television show, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian. According to the show’s theme song, sung by the Ken Darby Singers:

Well, he cleaned up the country,
The old Wild West country.
He made law and order prevail.
And none can deny it,
The legend of Wyatt
Forever will live on the trail.
Oh, Wyatt Earp! Wyatt Earp—brave, courageous, and bold—
Long live his fame, and long live his glory,
And long may his story be told.

IMDB lists fifteen feature-length films about Wyatt Earp, ten of them made since the debut of the TV show, the other five earlier—but none made before the 1931 Lake biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall.

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Then, what of Bat Masterson? 

Bat spent the 1880s and 1890s dabbling in law enforcement, journalism, dalliance with married women, and the world of prizefighting—not as a fighter but as a second, a timekeeper, and a friend of fighters and promoters. 

Eventually, in 1902, he moved to New York City with his wife, Emma. 

The day after his arrival, Bat was in trouble, scooped up by New York police who took him for an accomplice of a man they were arresting for bunco. He got the charge dropped but had to pay a ten-dollar fine because of the concealed weapon he was carrying.

A friend got Bat a job as a columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph. His column, “Masterson’s Views on Timely topics,” appeared three times a week from 1903 till his death in 1921. It concerned boxing and other sports-related topics. 

Gene Barry plays Bat Masterson on TV, 1958. Public Domain.

Alfred Henry Lewis, the friend who had gotten him the job, also published a fictionalized biography of Bat called The Sunset Trail. He encouraged Bat to write sketches about his adventures, which Lewis published in Human Life magazine. In the same magazine, Masterson provided biogaphical studies of several famed gunfighters, men he had known—Ben Thompson, Wyatt Earp, Luke Short, Doc Holliday, and Bill Tilghman. Other, similar articles were to follow, but Masterson apparently tired of the exercise, and Lewis wrapped up the series with his own article, “The King of the Gun-players: William Barclay Masterson.”

Lewis introduced Bat to President Theodore Roosevelt, who took an immediate liking to him. TR got him appointed deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of New York, with a respectable $2,000 annual salary (equivalent to about $70,000 today). He admonished the former frontier roughneck: “You must be careful not to gamble or do anything while a public officer which might afford opportunity to your enemies and my critics to say that your appointment was improper. I wish you to show this letter to Alfred Henry Lewis and go over the matter with him.” The president was on guard against Masterson’s known propensity to go off the rails. Bat kept the deputy marshal’s job until 1909, when Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, relieved him of that responsibility.

Bat continued writing his boxing column in the Telegraph. He was prominent in the crowd at the Johnson-Willard fight in Havana, Cuba, in 1915, serving as timekeeper or possibly as one of Jess Willard’s seconds. 

Bat Masterson circa 1911 in New York City. Public Domain.

He died of a heart attack in 1921, at age 67, while sitting at his desk working on his column for the Telegraph. About five hundred people attended his funeral. Attendees included writer Damon Runyon, a friend, who delivered the following eulogy: “He was a 100 percent, 22-karat real man. Bat was a good hater and a wonderful friend. He was always stretching out his hand to some down-and-outer. He had a great sense of humor and a marvelous fund of reminiscence, and was one of the most entertaining companions we have ever known. There are only too few men in the world like Bat Masterson and his death is a genuine loss.” 

The epitaph on his tombstone at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City says, “Loved by Everyone.”

Eleven years after Bat’s death, Damon Runyon published a collection of his distinctive New York influenced short stories under the title Guys and Dolls. The stories were later adapted into a hit Broadway musical by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, and Abe Burrows.  The central character of the stories, and of the musical, was a high-rolling gambler from Colorado named “Sky Masterson.” 

And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.

Next Week: Something Completely Different.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.16.25
by

Who Can Give Us Meaning?

Dear Reader: My apologies for postponing “Way Out West, Part V” for the second week in a row. It’s just that something came up. Next week, back to what passes for normal around here.

Charlie Kirk and former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. 15 July 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

I came home from an appointment Wednesday afternoon, and my wife asked from the kitchen if I’d heard somebody had been shot—I didn’t quite catch the name.

“Who?”

“Charlie Kirk,” she said. “It’s been on TV.”

“Oh. Charlie Kirk was shot. I’m very sorry to hear that. Who is Charlie Kirk?”

She pointed toward the livingroom, where the television spewed forth the stew of messy details and somber speculation that it always serves up at times like these. It announced in due course that Mr. Kirk had died from the single bullet he received in his throat. 

It turns out Charlie Kirk was a conservative political activist, a debater in the political arena, a Trump acolyte, the organizer and head of a huge student movement called Turning Point USA—in all, a Very Big Deal. 

I suppose that’s why people, adrift in the rip currents of our era, have been treating his death as a Very Big Deal. The airwaves abound with post-mortem speculations and virtue-freighted  posturings. The social media, too. 

Charlie Kirk’s fans certainly knew who he was. His critics likewise were very much aware of him. Perhaps I was the only person in America to whom he was not a household name, but then, I’m often accused of not paying attention. It’s really just that I pay attention to other things.

My wife pointed out to me that Kirk’s death cannot be dismissed as unremarkable, having played out amid a crowd of thousands. Kirk was killed at a political event while delivering a political message. The assassin meant the slaying as a political statement.

Before the echoes of the gunshot faded, all sorts of people, speaking or writing in public media, began testifying that the central meaning of this event is political.

Some say, “A man speaking his mind peacefully has been silenced. This is a threat to our First Amendment right of free speech.”

Some say, “His views were reprehensible. He deserved what he got.”

Some say, “When will we learn? We must re-establish civility in our public life.”

Some, like the governor of Utah, see this moment as a possible inflection point—an opportunity to change course as our nation struggles with divisive ideologies. 

All these diverse voices place the problem and the solution in the realm of politics.

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I think it goes deeper.

A man took a high-velocity bullet in his throat. His lifeblood poured out and his life was ended. His wife was widowed, his children left fatherless. The act was done by a man in the grip of powerful emotions he could not, or did not, control. His rage was murderous; he took it out in violence. 

The ancient human drama of killer and killed is the primary meaning of this event. The beliefs and polemical effectiveness of the victim, the beliefs and operational effectiveness of the assassin, are secondary. 

Our dogged insistence that the main meaning is political keeps us from seeing the real problem.

It leads our spokespeople to say fatuous things time and again, things that we know are not true, are meant only to assuage our sense of hopelessness. “We’ve got to understand the killer’s motive, so we can make sure nothing like this ever happens again.” 

Really? How has that been working out?

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We in our oh-so-enlightened society are loath to admit the flawed nature of human beings. It used to be called Original Sin, back when we believed in sin. But to believe in sin, you have to believe in God, for sin is a crime not only against one’s fellow man but against God. And we have no room for God.

Instead, we assume we are naturally good, or at least neutral, beings. We do evil only because we are influenced by a negative environment. If only We—that is, Society—learned how to take the right approach, We could eliminate crime and violence. We need to educate people better. 

  • If only Charlie Kirk had embraced a more enlightened political viewpoint, he would not have invited his own destruction.
  • If only the shooter had understood the First Amendment, he would not have sought to win his argument through violence.
  • If only we all took lessons in tact and diplomacy, this kind of existential conflict would be avoided.

What a mighty opinion we have of our human powers! 

If any of us are grown-ups, we should know by now that none of these things are true; that our powers and our understanding are limited; that even our internal will to do good is apt to falter in the face of felt needs and fears.

Think of all the people you know. Surely you know someone who embodies, in one person, both saint and sinner: the best kind of person and the worst kind of person, inseparable and unaware. 

Not many of us are prepared to take the thought further and examine ourselves for signs of this saint/sinner dichotomy. Maybe we’re afraid of what we’d find. 

My point is, we are mixed beings, both good and evil in one sweet package. Education will take us only so far. We need firm guidelines, if only to protect society. And because even those boundaries will never completely rein in our waywardness, we also need forgiveness.

There is a Stoic in me who says, “Do not expect much of people. We are weak reeds, unreliable stanchions. When people deliver goodness, be agreeably surprised. When they deliver badness, do not condemn but look to yourself and straighten out your own inner being.”

There is also a Christian in me who says, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I am only human.”

What Society needs is not some miraculous, altogether unattainable, political accommodation. People have been wrangling over divergent interests since the dawn of history. We haven’t got it all worked out yet, and we never will. 

What Society needs is humility. We need, for starters, the simple recognition that Man is not perfectible. We need some firm guidelines enforced socially, and we need a spiritual basis for hope. 

For me, it’s enough to trust that God has the answers, which must remain to me mysterious. I can live with that, but then I’m old.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.09.25
by

The Units

Dear Reader: Last week I promised you the final part of my 5-part series on the Old West. I am afraid I will have to ask you to be patient for another week. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this look back at some of the earliest memories of an old man. This post was originally published November 5, 2019.

Daddy’s friend Clark drove standing up. That’s the first thing I noticed. “That’s how milk trucks are,” he explained. “You have to drive standing up.” I was still amazed at this when we arrived at the circus. 

A three-ring circus, Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows. Public Domain image from State Archives of Florida, published under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 license.

There in the gathering darkness: a big tent on a dusty lot. We sat high up and saw people called “acrobats” fly through the air and drop into a big, bouncy net. And there came a little car that drove around the three circus rings and dropped off clowns, one by one—at least a dozen of them. The little truck, by some magic, seemed to to have an inexhaustible supply of clowns. 

A milk truck. You had to stand up. “DSC_5874” by improbcat is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 .

Clark drove the milk truck but did not own it. He was not a regular milkman. He was a college student like Daddy. He drove an early morning milk route for extra cash and could use the truck in off hours.

It was 1949; I was four. We lived in The Units—three or four rows of jerry-built shacks on the campus of Knox College. Each unit, one of three connected side by side, had a kitchen, a bath, a small livingroom, and two small bedrooms. Each unit housed a mommy, a daddy, and one or two very young children.

The occupants were families of war veterans attending college on the newly-enacted GI Bill. We moved in when I was three months old, in September 1945, and left in June 1949, not long after Daddy took me to the circus. 

Special Bond

The families who lived in The Units shared a special bond and a certain kind of outlook. The men were college students, the women housewives. They were all, on average, four or more years older than the typical entering freshman. They were householders, married, with young children. The usual campus hijinks of the era held no charm for them. They had their own hijinks. 

They were more serious men, you see, having just fought a war. Yet, like all students everywhere, they sometimes put studies on the back burner, accepting lower grades as a  reasonable price for the rich social life of The Units. That social life included beer, cigarettes, the needs of their toddlers, and late-night bridge games.

The family next door, with whom we shared a wall, was Bud and Helen Steele and their daughter Heather. Helen and Bud played bridge with Mommy and Daddy most nights in their place or ours. When the visiting couple got the contract, the one who was dummy got up and ran next door to check on the ostensibly sleeping child. Bud, whose name was Virgil, was a wiry man with a ready smile, from a family that farmed just south of Galesburg. Helen was a fresh-faced and friendly young woman from Saskatchewan. I don’t know how they managed to find each other, but they made a great match. They remained fast friends with our family long after The Units and until their dying days. My younger sister and I still keep in touch with Heather and her siblings, Hugh and Linelle.

Diversions and Hijinks

One of the men in The Units sought to beautify the little patch of green grass in front of his place by planting two or three sapling trees. Several of his colleagues, by dark of night, dug up the trees and, perhaps inspired by the beer, re-planted them upside-down.

Iceman and children. German Federal Archives, published under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

Life was likewise fun for us tots. A small pack of us roamed The Units, outdoors in almost any weather, older ones picking on younger ones. In summer the iceman came twice a week. Our iceboxes had to be replenished with large blocks of ice, which were slid into the upper compartment to cool the meat, butter, eggs, and milk in the lower compartment. The iceman used black wrought-iron tongs to lug these ice blocks into our kitchens. We kids waited beside the iceman’s idling truck until he came out, tongs empty, to get another ice-cake. Then the boldest of us, Dale Price, begged ice chips from the iceman. He gave us each a two- or three-inch sliver of ice to hold in our hands, very cold under the hot sun. You had to brush dirt and sawdust off the ice chip. Then you sucked on it for as long as you could stand, dropped it, and ran off to play another game. 

It may not sound like much, Gentle Reader; but for us it was a treat.

One time Dale Price drank turpentine from an old Campbell’s soup can my mommy had left on the back stoop, midway through a furniture painting project. Dale was rushed to the hospital to get his stomach pumped out. “Darn that Dale Price,” Mommy said. “Always getting into things.”

The Railroad

Burlington engine No. 5633, no longer going anywhere, on static display in Douglas, Wyoming. Photo by Wusel007, published under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Galesburg was a railroad town, astride two great lines: The Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy. The Units stood across South Cherry Street from the main line of the CB&Q. I clearly remember standing in our front yard on a bright morning, watching a fast train zoom by, pulled by a chugging black steam locomotive, perhaps a 4-8-4 “Northern,” a long cone of white smoke streaming out behind it. At night, I lay in my crib beside Teddy, my bear and best friend, and listened to the imponderable chug, roll, and bump of iron thunder as switch engines sorted and grouped railcars in the nearby Burlington yards. 

Mrs. Grable’s School

Life went on. Daddy had a part-time job taking the Galesburg Register-Mail to the outlying district of Bushnell in the afternoons. The GI Bill provided tuition, subsistence, books and supplies, equipment, and counseling services for veterans in college; but daily  expenses, beyond “subsistence,” could be tight. When I was three, Mommy got a part-time job as a secretary in an auto parts company, and I began attending a nursery school, “Mrs. Grable’s.” 

1950 DeSoto Suburban ad, Public Domain. Scanned by Alden Jewell, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Mrs. Grable had a large house with a big backyard and lots of toys and crayons. One or two other old ladies helped her wrangle kids. She had maybe a dozen of us. She picked us in the morning in her DeSoto Suburban—a big car with jump seats and room enough for the whole dozen of us. Later in the day she drove around The Units and dropped us off one by one, like circus clowns alighting from a mystery vehicle every afternoon at three.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author 

Larry F. Sommers

09.02.25
by

Way Out West, Part IV

The written word is primary.

James Fennimore Cooper, c. 1850. Photo by Matthew Brady. Public Domain.

Long before Marshal Matt Dillon strode the dusty streets of Dodge City; before Hoppy, Roy, and Gene rode the range; before Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson twirled their lassoes; before William S. Hart oozed western authenticity; before The Great Train Robbery was committed to celluloid—in fact, before movies could be produced and radio waves modulated—there were writers singing the praises, and hyping the romance, of the American West.

James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) may have been the first novelist to glamorize the West in his Leatherstocking Tales, which featured rugged frontier scout Natty Bumppo. The Deerslayer and his Native American friends, Chingachgook and Uncas, held sway in the forests of New York State. But in those days, as mentioned previously, the West was in the East. At least The Prairie—the last novel in the series, in story chronology—takes the aged Pathfinder all the way to the vast plains beyond the Mississippi.

Ned Buntline, c. 1886. Photo by Sarony, New York. Public Domain.

After Cooper, the next notable writer to euhemerize the West was Edward Zane Carroll Judson Sr. (1821-1886), a heavy drinker who went about the country giving temperance lectures, a raffish troublemaker who barely escaped the noose in more jurisdictions than one. Seeking sensational material to publish about Wild Bill Hickok, who had driven him off at gunpoint, Judson on the rebound met William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. The two gregarious men became friends, and Judson’s career as “Ned Buntline,” writer of western stories, was launched.

He published a serial novel, Buffalo Bill: King of the Border Men, in the New York Weekly beginning in 1869. That became the basis for two plays about the great man, one of which—written by Buntline—starred Cody as himself, with appearing Buntline in a supporting role. For several years, the great Cody shot buffalo for the railroad in summer and portrayed himself on stage in winter. This was Buffalo Bill’s introduction to show biz. If you want to know where that led, rent or borrow a copy of Annie Get Your Gun.

Emma Ghent Curtis, author of The Administratrix, c. 1894. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.

Buntline wrote other western-themed dime novels, none as successful as his early promotion of Buffalo Bill. Judson (Buntline) died of congestive heart failure in 1886, having briefly been one of the wealthiest authors in the country.

Owen Wister, c. 1903. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.

Meanwhile, Emma Ghent Curtis (1860-1918), a Hoosier transplanted to Colorado, was writing The Administratrix. Published in 1889, it was the first real cowboy novel, outside of the dime-novel tradition. Its protagonist is a woman who falls in love with a cowboy and then cross-dresses as a cowboy in order to find his murderer. Though Curtis may be fairly said to have invented the genre—wouldn’t you know?—it’s a man who gets all the credit.

Poster for the Broadway production of The Virginian by Wister and Kirke La Shelle, 1903. Public Domain.

Philadelphian Owen Wister (1860-1938) penned a novel of the West and got it published in 1902 as The Virginian. Unlike Curtis’s obscure novel, The Virginian sold 200,000 copies in the first year. It’s credited with establishing many now-familiar tropes including the cowboy hero, the innocent schoolmarm, and the devious villain. Wister became “the father of Western fiction.” The Virginian was made into a successful stage play and has been the basis of five movies and a TV show. The original novel has sold 1.5 million copies to date.

Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey. Harper & Brothers. Fair use.

In Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, a dentist, former minor league baseball player, and aspiring author named Zane Grey (1872-1939) read The Virginian, studied its style and structure, and decided to try his hand at a Western novel. After western adventures including a hunting trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, he got the feel of the West and taught himself to be a convincing Western writer. His novel The Last of the Plainsmen was rejected by Harper & Brothers but serialized by Outing magazine. The next one, The Heritage of the Desert, was published by Harper and became a best-seller. Two years later he produced Riders of the Purple Sage, his most successful book and one of the most successful Western novels in history.

Grey died in 1939 at age 67, the author of more than ninety books, most of them Westerns, and one of America’s first millionaire authors. 

“Hopalong Takes Command,” an illustration by artist Frank Schoonover for a 1905 Hopalong Cassidy story, in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

Another who deserves mention is Clarence E. Mulford (1883-1956). In 1904, Mulford created the cowboy character Hopalong Cassidy. In a series of short stories and 28 novels from then until 1941, Mulford sketched Cassidy’s adventures, elaborating a “detailed and authentic world filled with characters drawn from his extensive library research” (Wikipedia). 

Mulford sold film rights to Hollywood producer Harry Sherman, who made a popular series of Hopalong Cassidy films. On the silver screen, Cassidy’s character was changed from a profane, rough-hewn cowpuncher to the rather genteel, upstanding, hero portrayed by actor William Boyd and idolized by millions of us kids in the 1950s. (I even bought Hopalong Cassidy Cookies. They were delicious.)

Louis L’Amour in 1970. Photo by Thomas J. Kravitz, Los Angeles Times. Licensed under CC-BY-4.0

If Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford were prolific, the next great Western author was superabundant. Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) wrote 89 novels, fourteen short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction. Almost all of them Westerns. His novels really began to sell around 1950. Just at that time, when he was still a hungry writer, L’Amour actually wrote four new Hopalong Cassidy novels, under a pseudonym, under contract for people who were planning a series of books and magazine stories to capitalize on Hoppy’s new-found fame. 

Poster for Hondo, a movie based on a Louis L’Amour short story, “The Gift of Cochise,” novelized by L’Amour upon the film’s release. Fair use.

L’Amour’s version of Hopalong Cassidy was inspired by Mulford’s original roughneck, but the editors softened the character to comport with his new Hollywood identity. L’Amour disclaimed authorship of those four books forever after.

Your New Favorite Author’s long-time friend Bill Martinez, who worked for Bantam Books when L’Amour was under contract to them, escorted the celebrated author on elaborate book tours. He was a nice man, Bill told me, but on tour he needed someone to protect him and carve out down time, especially since he was ill at that stage of his life.

Poster for Lonesome Dove, based on the novel by McMurtry. Fair use.

And just when we might have thought all possible changes had been rung on the Western literary canon, along comes Larry McMurtry (1936-2021). McMurtry was a writer for all seasons, producing a large body of work in several genres and types, but much of it was Western fiction. The most famous book is probably McMurtry’s epic 1985 cowboy novel Lonesome Dove. The book, about retired Texas Rangers who own a cattle company and go on a cattle drive, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a four-part TV miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. Because of the era when it was written, Lonesome Dove dealt with adult issues including sex, violence, and betrayal in a more forthright way. Most people who have read Lonesome Dove—or, for that matter, any of McMurtry’s other major works—acknowledge him to be a master storyteller.

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Your New Favorite Writer is well aware, Dear Reader, that there have been Westerns written and filmed since Larry McMurtry. But I think it’s amazingly advanced of me to work in Lonesome Dove, what with its being post-1957 and all. 

Perhaps you’ll be relieved to learn this installment concludes our little colloquium on Westerns—except that there is one curious post-script to scribe, or footnote to note, about a couple of larger-than-life characters who bridged the span of time, having one boot firmly in the Old West and the other in what we may think of as modern-day America.

Tune in next week for One More Round.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

08.26.25
by

Way Out West, Part III

Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy were the Big Three. 

Supreme Pictures poster for 1936 Johnny Mack Brown film Desert Phantom. Public Domain.

But there were also Johnny Mack Brown, John Wayne, Jock Mahoney the Range Rider, and others. They rode across desert, plains, and mountains, chasing bad guys and protecting the innocent. That all happened in a hazy time frame that might have been the 19th century but sometimes looked like the 20th—when the moviemakers included automobiles, for example. 

An endless series of cowboy films made in the 1940s—“B” pictures, made mostly by Republic or other “Poverty Row” studios—played endlessly on our TV sets in the 1950s. 

Television was new. It was all black and white, with constant technical problems, despite which it swept the nation. “In 1948, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one television; in 1955, 75 percent did,” says Wikipedia.

Family watches TV in 1958. Photo by Evert F. Baumgardner. Public Domain.

That made my family late adopters; we got our first TV in 1957. Before that, I would drop by my friends’ houses after school to watch Midwest Matinee on WCIA-TV, Channel 3 out of Champaign, Illinois. Midwest Matinee, formerly Western Theater, was just like the afternoon show on every other TV station in the land. A genial host, in this case “Sheriff Sid,” entertained a gaggle of children in the studio but mainly introduced segments of old cowboy films. 

Sheriff Sid and the kids. Fair use.

Local stations could rent these classics cheaply, and a large crowd of children would glue themselves to their sets. The films shown on afternoon kids’ shows seldom featured the Big Three—Roy, Gene, and Hoppy. They were superstars, still at the top of the box office. But we kids had an appetite for stars like Wild Bill Elliott, Lash LaRue, Rex Allen, and the Cisco Kid.

Rex Allen had his own comic book series. Public Domain.

All this late-afternoon western viewing was a result of local stations renting low-budget westerns. Prime Time, the domain of the Big Three networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—was dominated by situation comedies like I Love Lucy and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and by quiz shows like You Bet Your Life and The $64,000 Question.

But funny things can happen in Hollywood. The high-budget western film industry, which had given us pre-war epics like John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne, and Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific (also 1939), with Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea, now invented a new product called “adult westerns.” 

These were films with a western setting but with dramatic psychological undertones or social messages. Films like Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952), starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, and George Stevens’s Shane (1953), with Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon DeWilde, and Jack Palance, made network programmers sit up and take notice. Something new was going on. 

Gary Cooper pleads for Grace Kelly’s understanding in High Noon. Public Domain.

In those days, the early 1950s, Radio was still a force, producing and airing a full variety of programs, including dramas acted out with convincing sound effects. It was only just dawning on America that everybody wanted to watch TV.

In 1952, CBS had launched a radio drama called Gunsmoke about a western marshal, Matt Dillon, played by popular voice actor William Conrad. It was meant to be a more adult kind of western than the kids’ cowboys who dominated the dial—The Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid, and the Big Three. 

Matt Dillon, by contrast, would be a hard man disillusioned by constantly meeting the lowest scum of the frontier. He had a close, unspecified relationship with a dance-hall hostess, Miss Kitty, and provided steady business in the form of gunshot victims for the town physician, Doc Adams. He also had an assistant named Chester, who had little of the competence, and none of the comic relief, of traditional sidekicks like Gabby Hayes, Smiley Burnett, and Pat Buttram. 

James Arness as Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, 1956. Public Domain.

Gunsmoke episodes featured adult themes, and Marshal Dillon often found himself on the short end of the stick. The program ran for nine years during a time when radio drama was dying, the medium dissolving into a platform for disc jockeys and talk show hosts. 

It was so popular that CBS made it over for TV. The manly-voiced yet pudgy actor William Conrad was replaced in the role of Matt Dillon by lanky and manly James Arness. The first television episodes of Gunsmoke ran in 1955. It played continuously in prime time, on a weekly basis, for twenty years.

Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp, with Louise Fletcher, 1961. Public Domain.

In Hollywood, success breeds imitation. The imitation can be so instant that sometimes all the players seem to have the same idea at the same time. On ABC, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian, premiered just four days before Gunsmoke on CBS. And Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker, came along, also on ABC, two weeks later.

It took a couple of years for the notion to sink in, but the floodgates were opened. We, the American people, simply couldn’t get enough TV westerns:

  • Broken Arrow, with John Lupton and Michael Ansara, ABC 1956-1960.
  • Have Gun—Will Travel, starring Richard Boone, CBS 1957-1963.
  • Sugarfoot, with Will Hutchins, ABC 1957-1961.
  • Wagon Train, with Ward Bond and Robert Horton, NBC 1957-1962 and ABC 1962-1965.
  • Maverick, starring James Garner and Jack Kelly, ABC 1957-1962.
  • Trackdown, with Robert Culp, CBS 1957-1959.
  • Wanted Dead or Alive, with Steve McQueen, CBS 1957-59.
  • Bronco, with Ty Hardin, ABC 1958-1962.
Steve McQueen as bounty hunter Josh Randall in Wanted Dead or Alive, 1958. Public Domain.

  • Bat Masterson, starring Gene Barry, NBC 1958-1961.
  • Lawman, starring John Russell and Peter Brown, ABC 1958-1962.
  • The Rifleman, with Chuck Connors, ABC 1958-1963.
  • Rawhide, with Eric Fleming and Clint Eastwood, CBS 1959-1965.
  • Bonanza, starring Lorne Greene, Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker, and Michael Landon, NBC 1959-1973.
  • Laramie, with John Smith, Robert L. Crawford Jr., Robert Fuller, and Hoagy Carmichael, NBC 1959-1963.
  • The Virginian, starring James Drury and Doug McClure, NBC 1962-1971.
  • The Rebel, starring Nick Adams, ABC 1965-1961.
  • The Big Valley, starring Barbara Stanwyck, ABC 1965-1969.
  • The Wild Wild West, starring Robert Conrad and Ross Martin, CBS 1965-1969.
  • The High Chaparral, with Leif Erickson and Cameron Mitchell, NBC 1967-1971.
  • Alias Smith and Jones, with Pete Duel/Roger Davis and Ben Murphy, ABC 1971-1973.

I’ve probably left some out. They were all over the dial. Besides the newly-created westerns listed here, networks and local stations kept right on playing new installments and reruns of our old kiddie shows featuring the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Gene Autry. Not to mentnion variants such as Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, a Canadian western, and Sky King, an aviation western.

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Your New Favorite Writer grew up on all this intellectual property, should you choose to call it that.  Dear Reader, it was intensely romantic to me. 

I listend on the radio three nights a week to The Lone Ranger, that daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains. And between movies and TV, I spent hundreds of hours in Monument Valley. 

But living in Illinois, I had never been any place that was not flat. When I was twelve, we moved to Wisconsin, and I learned for the first time there were hills—gently rolling, rounded hills, with holsteins grazing peacefully by well over ten thousand picturesque lakes. 

I had never seen an honest-to-God mountain.

In 1958, we set out in our 1953 Buick Special for a grand tour of the West. I was thirteen and my kid sister, Cynda, was eight. We were thrilled. 

Dad laid a sheet of plywood across the transmission hump in the back seat so there would be a flat floor. Cynda and I thus had our own compartment, with two sleeping berths: back bench seat and plywood floor with a sleeping bag laid over the top. There was no question of seat belts. Cars did not have them, and we did not yet know we needed them. Luckily, [SPOILER ALERT:] we did not crash.

We drove down through Illinois and Missouri, following Route 66. Not much to see, only a few oil wells with rocking-horse-style pumpjacks at the wellheads. 

In western Kansas, however, around Dodge City—Gunsmoke territory, Wyatt Earp territory— the landforms began to change. Undulating hills were covered with clump grass—not actual sagebrush yet, but something definitely western-looking. 

Aapproaching Albuquerque, New Mexico, we saw our first mountains, the Sandia Range, from fifty miles away!  Whoa. This was something. 

Sandia Mountains at sunset. Photo by G. Thomas. Public Domain.

Aunt Jo, who lived in Albuquerque, took us to Old Town, where everything was heavily Spanish-influenced. We went to a nice Mexican restaurant and ate tamales and sopapillas. We shopped in a store that claimed to be a “trading post,” where I bought a pair of genuine Indian mocassins. They weren’t very comfortable, but I sure enjoyed wearing them.

North of Albuquerque, in Taos, we stayed in our first motel. It was the usual kind of 1950s motel: A row of little cabins. The motel office in the center cabin had postcards and matchbooks that bore the slogan “Best in the West.” It didn’t mean just this particular motel. There was a group of motels that advertised together. They, as a group, were “Best in the West.” 

I don’t know whether that chain evolved into today’s Best Western or not. Local motels being part of a larger, regional group—that was novel. We had never heard the term “Holiday Inn” or “Motel 6.”

We drove on through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, and back across Minnesota and Wisconsin to home. 

We saw lots of mountains. And cowboys. And tumbleweeds. And Indians. And such like. 

I thought it was great. I didn’t get enough of it. In the intervening years, I’ve spent little time in the great American West. But I’ve always enjoyed it.

Maybe the reason I enjoy it so much is all those shows I saw. Not the reality of the American West, but a fanciful version conjured by writers, producers, directors, actors, and others. Did you notice I listed “writers” first?  Tune in next Tuesday.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer