About the Author

ALAN LE MAY was born in Indianapolis in 1899 of parents who had both grown up on the plains frontier and from whom he learned firsthand of the hard-ships and the romance of the pioneering life about which he later wrote. He began an unusually varied career by playing football at Stetson University in Florida. During World War I he served as a lieutenant of infantry, afterwards continuing his studies at the University of Chicago. After graduation, he worked as a geologist in the jungles of Colombia, lived for a year in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans, and spent the following winter skiing in Massachusetts. Then, he went West to work on ranches in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Between 1927 and 1937 he wrote a series of adventure tales that quickly won critical acclaim both here and in England. For the next sixteen years, he divided his time between writing screen plays (among these Along Came Jones, San Antonio, Cheyenne, and The Sundowners) and short stories for magazines, and working his own cattle ranch in California. This life was interrupted by a stint in Korea as a war correspondent for the United Nations. His first novel, The Searchers, was published in 1954 and was later produced as a motion picture. This highly successful work was followed by The Unforgiven in 1957 and By Dim and Flaring Lamps in 1962. Mr. Le May died in 1964.