Leigh Brackett was born on December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, and raised near Santa Monica. Having spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy - playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H Rider Haggard - she began writing fantastic adventures of her own. Several of these early efforts were read by Henry Kuttner, who critiqued her stories and introduced her to the SF personalities then living in California, including Robert Heinlein, Julius Schwartz, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton - and another aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury. In 1944, based on the hard-boiled dialogue in her first novel, No Good From a Corpse, producer/director Howard Hawks hired Brackett to collaborate with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Brackett maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Hollywood for the remainder of her life. Between writing screenplays for such films as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, and The Long Goodbye, she produced novels such as the classic The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the Spur Award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind (1963). Brackett married Edmond Hamilton on New Year's Eve in 1946, and the couple maintained homes in the high-desert of California and the rural farmland of Kinsman, Ohio. Just weeks before her death on March 17, 1978, she turned in the first draft screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and the film was posthumously dedicated to her.

William Riley "W. R." Burnett was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for the crime novel Little Caesar, the film adaptation of which is considered the first of the classic American gangster movies. Burnett was born in Springfield, Ohio. He left his civil service job there to move to Chicago when he was 28, by which time he had written over 100 short stories and five novels, all unpublished. Burnett kept busy, producing a novel or more a year and turning most into screenplays (some as many as three times). Thematically Burnett was similar to Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain but his contrasting of the corruption and corrosion of the city with the better life his characters yearned for, represented by the paradise of the pastoral, was fresh and original. He portrayed characters who, for one reason or another, fell into a life of crime. Once sucked into this life they were unable to climb out. They typically get one last shot at salvation but the oppressive system closes in and denies redemption. Burnett's characters exist in a world of twilight morality—virtue can come from gangsters and criminals, malice from guardians and protectors. Above all his characters are human and this could be their undoing. Burnett worked with many of the greats in acting and directing, including Raoul Walsh, John Huston, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Michael Cimino, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Paul Muni, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood. He received an Oscar nomination for his script for "Wake Island" (1942) and a Writers Guild nomination for his script for "The Great Escape". In addition to his film work he also wrote scripts for television and radio. On his death in 1982, in Santa Monica, California,Burnett was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California

Louis Dearborn L'Amour (March 22, 1908 – June 10, 1988) was an American novelist and short-story writer. L'Amour's books, primarily Western fiction, remain enormously popular, and most have gone through multiple printings. At the time of his death all 101 of his works were in print (86 novels, 14 short-story collections and one full-length work of nonfiction) and he was considered "one of the world's most popular writers". -Wikipedia

Also wrote westerns as Clay Fisher. Henry Wilson Allen (September 12, 1912 – October 26, 1991) was an American author and screenwriter. He used several different pseudonyms for his works. His 50+ novels of the American West were published under the pen names Will Henry and Clay Fisher. Allen's screenplays and scripts for animated shorts were credited to Heck Allen and Henry Allen. Allen's career as a novelist began in 1952, with the publication of his first Western No Survivors. Allen, afraid that the studio would disapprove of his moonlighting, used a pen-name to avoid trouble.[3] He would go on to publish over 50 novels, eight of which were adapted for the screen. Most of these were published under one or the other of the pseudonyms Will Henry and Clay Fisher. Allen was a five-time winner of the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America and a recipient of the Levi Strauss Award for lifetime achievement. Henry Wilson Allen was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Allen died of pneumonia on October 26, 1991 in Van Nuys, California. He was 79.

Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860, in Germantown, a neighborhood within the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Owen Jones Wister, was a wealthy physician, one of a long line of Wisters raised at the storied Belfield estate in Germantown. His mother, Sarah Butler Wister, was the daughter of actress Fanny Kemble. Education He briefly attended schools in Switzerland and Britain, and later studied at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a classmate of Theodore Roosevelt, an editor of the Harvard Lampoon and a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon (Alpha chapter). Wister graduated from Harvard in 1882. At first he aspired to a career in music, and spent two years studying at a Paris conservatory. Thereafter, he worked briefly in a bank in New York before studying law, having graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1888. Following this, he practiced with a Philadelphia firm, but was never truly interested in that career. He was interested in politics, however, and was a staunch Theodore Roosevelt backer. In the 1930s, he opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Writing career Wister had spent several summers out in the American West, making his first trip to Wyoming in 1885. Like his friend Teddy Roosevelt, Wister was fascinated with the culture, lore and terrain of the region. On an 1893 visit to Yellowstone, Wister met the western artist Frederic Remington; who remained a lifelong friend. When he started writing, he naturally inclined towards fiction set on the western frontier. Wister's most famous work remains the 1902 novel The Virginian, the loosely constructed story of a cowboy who is a natural aristocrat, set against a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War and taking the side of the large land owners. This is widely regarded as being the first cowboy novel and was reprinted fourteen times in eight months.[5] The book is dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt. Personal life In 1898, Wister married Mary Channing, his cousin.The couple had six children. Wister's wife died during childbirth in 1913, as Theodore Roosevelt's first wife had died giving birth to Roosevelt's first daughter, Alice. Wister died at his home in Saunderstown, Rhode Island. He is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.

Alan Brown Le May was an American novelist and screenplay writer. He is most remembered for two classic Western novels, The Searchers and The Unforgiven. They were adapted into the motion pictures "The Searchers" and "The Unforgiven". He also wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for "North West Mounted Police" (1940), "Reap the Wild Wind" (1942), "Blackbeard the Pirate" (1952). He wrote the original source novel for "Along Came Jones" (1945), as well as a score of other screenplays and an assortment of other novels and short stories. Le May wrote and directed "High Lonesome" (1950). Le May also wrote and produced (but did not direct) "Quebec" (1951.

Elmore John Leonard lived in Dallas, Oklahoma City and Memphis before settling in Detroit in 1935. After serving in the navy, he studied English literature at the University of Detroit where he entered a short story competition. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Father of Peter Leonard.

Elmer Kelton (1926-2009) was award-winning author of more than forty novels, including The Time It Never Rained, Other Men’s Horses, Texas Standoff and Hard Trail to Follow. He grew up on a ranch near Crane, Texas, and earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas. His first novel, Hot Iron, was published in 1956. Among his awards have been seven Spurs from Western Writers of America and four Western Heritage awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His novel The Good Old Boys was made into a television film starring Tommy Lee Jones. In addition to his novels, Kelton worked as an agricultural journalist for 42 years. He served in the infantry in World War II. He died in 2009. http://us.macmillan.com/author/elmerk...

Schaefer was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of an attorney. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1929 with a major in English. He attended graduate school at Columbia University from 1929-30, but left without completing his Master of Arts degree. He then went to work for the United Press. In his long career as a journalist, he would hold editorial positions at many eastern publications. Schaefer's first success as a novelist came in 1949 with his memorable novel Shane, set in Wyoming. Few realized that Schaefer himself had never been anywhere near the west. Nevertheless, he continued writing successful westerns, selling his home in Connecticut and moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1955. In 1975 Schaefer received the Western Literature Association's Distinguished Achievement award. He died of heart failure in Santa Fe in 1991. Schaefer was married twice, his second wife moving to Santa Fe with him. Schaefer's novel Monte Walsh was made into a movie in 1970, with Lee Marvin in the title role, and again in 2003 as a TV movie starring Tom Selleck. Shane was also made into a movie and a series. from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack\_Sch...

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Thomas Louis Berger was an American novelist, probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man, which was adapted into a film by Arthur Penn. Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's use of humor and his often biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist, though he rejected that classification.

Dorothy Marie Johnson (December 19, 1905–November 11, 1984) was an American author best known for her Western fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy...