Ernest Haycox

The novel Trouble Shooter (1936), originally serialized in Collier's, was the basis for the movie Union Pacific (1939), directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea.

Haycox wrote the screenplay for Montana (1950), directed by Ray Enright, which stars Alexis Smith and Errol Flynn.

While living in New York Haycox wrote his first series of interconnected stories set in Burnt Creek, a town in central Oregon.

Haycox made several trips to battlefields in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts and wrote eight stories and two novelettes set during that era.

After his move back to Oregon in 1926, Haycox concentrated on Westerns, and he precisely researched the military uniforms of eras he wrote about.

Haycox did write a story set in Abilene with Sheriff Tom Smith as a character called On Texas Street.

In these stories, I suspect Haycox made his own geography, named his own towns and mountains and rivers; he peopled them with tough abrasive characters whose only law was their self will.

Collier's declined this novel,[11] and the manuscript apparently was destroyed, as it was not included in the preserved Ernest Haycox Papers.

[15] At the end of 1948 through the beginning of 1949 Haycox published three stories, one in Collier's and two in The Saturday Evening Post, featuring the Mercy family.