Dorothy M. Johnson
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Dorothy Marie Johnson (McGregor, Iowa December 19, 1905– November 11, 1984) was an American author best known for her Western fiction.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Dorothy Marie Johnson was the only child of Lester Eugene Johnson (December 20, 1870–December 13, 1915) and Mary Louisa Johnson (née Barlow, December 30, 1879–December 28, 1960). In March 1913 her family moved to Whitefish in Northwest Montana.
She always considered Whitefish to be her home town, and later wrote a memoir of her early years there: “When You and I Were Young, Whitefish,” published in 1982. She was appointed to the lifetime position of Whitefish's honorary chief of police.
It was while she was a student at Whitefish High School that she began her professional writing career: she worked as a stringer for The Daily Inter Lake, a newspaper published in Kalispell, Montana, fourteen miles south of Whitefish.[1]
[edit] Professional life
Her writing career began to take off by the 1930s. In 1935 her story Beulah Bunny was published and began a series of four stories. Her writing was temporarily detoured by World War II as she went to work for the Air Warden Service. After the war she produced some of her best known Western stories. These include The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in 1949 and A Man Called Horse. These two stories would later be filmed.[2]
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Novels
- Buffalo Woman (1977)
- All the Buffalo Returning (1979)
[edit] Juvenile Novels
- Farewell to Troy (1964)
- Witch Princess (1967)
[edit] Short Story Collections
- Beulah Bunny Tells All (US edition, 1942); Miss Bunny Intervenes (UK edition, 1948)
- Indian Country (1953)
- The Hanging Tree (1957)
- Flame on the Frontier: Short Stories of Pioneer Woman (1967)
[edit] Non-Fiction
- The Private Secretary by John Robert Gregg (1943); ghost written by Johnson
- Famous Lawmen of the Old West (1963)
- Ancient Greek Dress (1964)
- Greece: Wonderland of the Past and Present (1964)
- Some Went West (1965)
- Artists of Carmel: 15 Profiles (1968)
- Warrior for a Lost Nation (1969)
- All About Riding: Learn to Ride—and Ride Well (1969)
- Western Badmen (1970)
- The Bloody Bozeman: The Perilous Trail to Montana's Gold (1971)
- Montana (States of the Nation series) (1971)
- The Bedside Book of Bastards (1973); with R.T. Turner
- When You and I Were Young, Whitefish (1982)
- Kansas Wildlife Chef (1985)
[edit] External Links
[edit] Web sources
[edit] Print References
- Alter, Judy. Dorothy Johnson. BSU Western Writers Series, #44. Boise State University, 1980.
- Kich, Martin. Western American Novelists. Volume 1: Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Dan Cushman, H.L. Davis, Vardis Fisher, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., William Humphrey and Dorothy M. Johnson. New York; London: Garland, 1995.
- Smith, Steve. The Years and the Wind and the Rain: A Biography of Dorothy M. Johnson. Steve Smith. Missoula, Montana: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, 1984.
