Ernest Haycox

Ernest James Haycox (October 1, 1899 – October 13, 1950) was an American writer of Western fiction.

Haycox was born in Portland, Oregon, to William James Haycox and the former Martha Burghardt on October 1, 1899. After receiving an education in the local schools of both Washington state and Oregon, he enlisted in the United States Army in 1915 and was stationed along the Mexican border in 1916. During World War I he was in Europe, and after the war he spent one year at Reed College in Portland. In 1923, Haycox graduated from the University of Oregon with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism, where he also started writing under professor W. F. G. Thacher. In 1925, Haycox married Jill M. Chord, and they had two children.

He published two dozen novels and about 300 short stories, many of which appeared first in pulp magazines in the early 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was a regular contributor to Collier's Weekly from 1931 and The Saturday Evening Post from 1943. Fans of his work included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, and the latter once wrote, "I read The Saturday Evening Post whenever it has a serial by Ernest Haycox."

His story "Stage to Lordsburg" (1937) was made into the movie Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford and featuring John Wayne in the role that made him a star. 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.

Haycox died after unsuccessful cancer surgery in 1950, twelve days after his 51st birthday, in Portland. In 2005, the Western Writers of America voted Haycox one of the 24 best Western authors of the Twentieth Century.

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

From 1924 through 1926, Haycox lived in New York City, and he became deeply interested in the American Revolution. 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 publishing one of these stories, Haycox received a letter from a reader stating that Haycox did not describe the uniforms of the soldiers correctly. Haycox promptly purchased a book on the Revolutionary era military uniforms. After his move back to Oregon in 1926, Haycox concentrated on Westerns, and he precisely researched the military uniforms of eras he wrote about.

Appearing in Collier's between 1933 and 1938, these stories are set in New Hope, a trading town on the Missouri River in the 1880s. Many of these stories are told in the first person, a device Haycox used about a dozen times during his writing career.