Writer from nowhere: How Jack Schaefer found the West in himself

(Santa Fe New Mexican) "He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West.” Thus ends Jack Schaefer’s first novel Shane, the gripping tale of a mysterious, laconic gunslinger that was adapted into the beloved 1953 Western movie.
Schaefer was an itinerant newspaperman from Ohio when his book was published in 1949, having first been serialized in Argosy magazine under the title Rider From Nowhere. But the greatest secret of Shane is that as its author labored over the story — destined to be counted among the best Western fiction of all time — he had never traveled farther west than Cleveland. Continued