ELMER KELTON (1926-2009)

"My dad wanted to make a cowboy out of me, but every time he turned around to see where I was, I was reading a book."

Crane, Texas (1940s)
"In an oil-patch town like Crane a boy who excelled in English and won spelling bees was automatically suspect."

No writer ever knew West Texas better than Elmer Kelton.  No, that's not quite correct.  Let me start over.  No writer ever knew west Texas as well as Elmer Kelton.

After all, he was born on a west Texas ranch where first his grandfather and than his father was the foreman.  He grew up near the town of Crane on the McElroy Ranch located in Upton and Crane counties where his father, R.W. "Buck" Kelton, was employed for over thirty years.  His mother was Neta Beatrice "Bea" (nee Parker).

Kelton wrote in his autobiography, Sandhills Boy: The Winding Trail of a Texas Writer (2010), that:

"Dad gave me every chance to learn to be a cowboy.  I was probably the greatest failure of his life.  I was always better talking about it, and writing about it, than I ever was at doing it .... By the time I was eight or nine years old, I fantasized about someday writing the Great American Novel."

A good listener, Kelton was quoted as saying that "Cowboys, especially in the days before television, were pretty good storytellers.  As a kid I loved to sit around and listen to them talk.  I soaked it up like a sponge."

After high school he attended the University of Texas at Austin and was a semester shy of graduation when he was drafted into the army during WWII and served in the infantry in Europe from 1944 to 1946.  A Bronze Star was among his ciatations.

After the war he finished his degree in journalism at the University of Texas.  Beginning in 1948 he wrote for over forty years about farming and ranching in west Texas for various agricultural newspapers and journals, before retiring in 1990.

Kelton's mother, a former school teacher, encouraged him to be a writer, but his father was rather dubious about his son's career choice.  His response was "That's the way with you kids nowadays, you all want to make a living without working for it."

When asked if he had any advice for young writers, Kelton said: "Keep your day job.  Read, read, and keep on reading.  Write, write, and keep on writing."

Kelton took his own advice.  He kept his day job.

During those four decades as an agricultural journalist he wrote fiction in his spare time, in the evenings and on the weekends.  He began writing short stories for pulp magazines and published his first novel, Hot Iron, in 1955.

He went on to write more than forty novels, all westerns, and, with few exceptions, set in west Texas.

His first real recognition was due to the publication of his novel, Buffalo Wagons (1957), which received the highest honor that a western novel can receive, that being a prestigious Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.

That was just the beginning, for six of his later novels would also win the award.  They are: The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971); The Time it Never Rained (1973); Slaughter (1992); The Far Canyon (1994); Eyes of the Hawk (2001); and The Way of the Coyote (2002).

In addition, three of his novels have received Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.  They are: The Time It Never Rained (1973); The Good Old Boys (1982); and The Man Who Rode Midnight (1987).

Note that The Time It Never Rained is the only Kelton novel to be honored by both organizations.  This is only fitting since it is his most popular and most critically acclaimed work, as well as being his personal favorite.

In 1995, The Good Old Boys was made into a TV movie on TNT, starring Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed and co-wrote the script.  To date, it is the only Kelton story to be adapted for film.

That same year Kelton's peers in the Western Writers of America organization voted him the "All-time Best Western Author."  I don't know where the two biggest selling authors, Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, placed, but it was somewhere behind Willa Cather who finished a distant second.

When asked in an interview how he felt about the vote, he said, "I'd hate to have to stand up and defend that in front of a jury.  I appreciate the compliment, but I can't say that I believe it."

Kelton's primary theme in his novels "has always been change and how people adpt to it or don't adapt."  Never is this more apparent than it is in his most acclaimed novel, The Time It Never Rained.

It is the story of an actual drought that occurred in west Texas during the 50's, one that lasted seven long years.

During those years the ability of ranchers to adapt was severely tested year after year.

Kelton not only wrote about the drought in his novel, he lived it.

He said that "I could never have written it without my experience as a reporter.  That drought was my daily running story as an agricultural writer for seven years."

Charlie Flagg is the story's primary protagonist.  Kelton said, "I have heard Charlie described as a mythical character representing old-fashioned ideals of rugged individualism and free enterprise.  To me there was nothing mythical about him.  He was real."

And so were you, Mr. Kelton.