For Conservative Movie Lovers: Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and 'Shane' Part 1

Everyone, it would seem, has an idol — someone who looms large in one’s imagination, and whose example irrevocably changes the direction and purpose of one’s life.

For author Jack Schaefer (1907–1991), one such figure was Wilbur Daniel Steele, a then-popular but now-forgotten writer of the 1920s and ’30s. In his heyday, Steele won so many O. Henry awards (eleven in all) that he was eventually banned from the contest. “The best short story writer there has ever been,” Schaefer believed, ever thankful that Steele’s work had taught him at a young age that “Writing short stories is a craft” and that “Words are beautiful things.”

Conservative movie lovers who admire the 1953 film Shane, based off of Schaefer’s first and most famous book, should be thankful as well.

Growing up in Cleveland a century ago, reading and writing were early passions for Schaefer. “My parents were both readers,” he said. “There was always a houseful of books. They didn’t stop me or try to check my reading habits. I just read everything in sight. . . When I was a kid I read more Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs than anything else.”

He earned his undergraduate degree at Oberlin, studying Greek and Latin and the great classics, but his graduate studies at Columbia University proved to be soul-killing. Schaefer grew to despise “the silly jargon and critical gobbledygook that flourishes in the snobbish little quarterlies” that academics regularly published, considering them “a dull and stupid waste of time. All that piling up of detail! And for what purpose?”

The last straw came when

I had what I thought was a bright idea for my thesis. I wanted to do research on the development of motion pictures. At that time I had an aunt who reviewed films ready to assist me. Besides that I had a tremendous interest in films. The thesis committee at Columbia just laughed at me. They said that movies were merely cheap reproductions of stage plays. After that I left Columbia. I have never been back and have never regretted leaving at all.

Schaefer ultimately became a journalist, writing millions of words of editorials, reviews, and other assorted filler for various small newspapers on the Eastern seaboard. By 1944 he was editor for the tiny Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, overworked and getting nowhere.

“Primarily as a means of relaxation,” he said later, “I started writing fiction late at night.” A lover of stories written in the “direct old-fashioned manner. . . in the ancient tradition of tale-tellers,” he soon gravitated to Westerns. Schaefer knew that “Most people ask, ‘Why write Westerns?’ They’re one step above comic books,” yet he was attracted to the way the genre supported almost Arthurian notions of heroism. In the wild West, Schaefer believed, “the energies and capabilities of men and women, for good or for evil, were unleashed on an individual basis as they had rarely been before or elsewhere in human history.”

To that end, he decided to write “a short story about the basic legend of the West,” a tale “classical in form — stripped to the absolute essentials, starting and moving in a straight line to an inevitable conclusion.”

One glaring roadblock was that he had never been west of Ohio in his entire life, so he relied on books and his imagination to see him through. “I didn’t use any particular book as background for Shane,” he said, “simply general notions out of years of desultory reading of western material with no notion of ever using any of them in writing of my own.”

As his story developed, it focused was on a young boy in 1880s Wyoming and the strange, mysterious gunslinger, haunted by a violent past, whom he idolizes. Schaefer’s hero is a dangerous man, one with “sharp, hidden hardnesses in him,” but also one “in whom a boy could believe in the simple knowing that what was beyond comprehension was still clean and solid and right.” The author later mused that, “I believe that Shane had the qualities of my father. Of course, my father wasn’t Shane, but he that sort of man.” Fathers, it could be said, are the ultimate idols, and Shane brims with respect for the bonds forged between young boys and worthy, heroic father figures.

Eventually, the short story grew into a short novella that Schaefer titled “Rider from Nowhere.” “Finally I sent it to Argosy,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about markets. I had only one copy of this Western novella and that was single-spaced. I didn’t even include a return envelope.”

Miraculously, after several months the long-running pulp magazine accepted it, and published it as a three-part serial in the fall of 1946 (misspelling his name on the cover, natch). Soon he began landing other short stories in magazines like Boy’s Life, Collier’s, Blue Book, and the Saturday Evening Post. After he divorced his first wife in 1948 and remarried, his second spouse wisely encouraged him to give up the day job and try to make it as a full-time writer.

To do that, he needed to become a novelist, so he dug out his first publication, “Rider from Nowhere,” and set about expanding it, beefing up certain episodes and adding a few new chapters. The resulting typescript, now titled Shane, was shopped around the big publishing houses. “We were in New York without a cent,” Schaefer remembered later, “with me selling a pint of blood every now and then.”

After some disheartening rejections, an enterprising agent got the book published in 1949 by Houghton Mifflin. While never a bestseller, it sold nice and steady, and soon attracted the attention of Hollywood. Throughout his ensuing career as a novelist, it was Shane — Schaefer’s very first story, a tale about a boy and his haunted, heroic idol — that remained his most popular.

There’s a kind of coda to the creation of Shane. While living in Connecticut in the early 1950s as a popular Western novelist (before his move out west to New Mexico), Schaefer learned that his own longtime idol, Wilbur Daniel Steele, was living in retirement close by. Remembering how influential the man’s work had been during his youth, he endeavored to drop in for a surprise visit.

“I drove out there,” Schaefer remembered decades later, “and saw an old man in tennis shoes and a sweater. I introduced myself and said something about two of his stories, ‘Thirst’ and The Man Who Saw Through Heaven.”

What happened next was entirely unexpected. “He got down on the grass and started to cry. Said he didn’t know that others still read his work.”

“Writing short stories is a craft,” Schaefer was wont to say. “Words are beautiful things.”

That they are. And so are idols.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING