Sun 13 Apr 2014
A Western Fiction Review by Dan Stumpf: DOROTHY M. JOHNSON – The Hanging Tree and Other Stories.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction[5] Comments
DOROTHY M. JOHNSON – The Hanging Tree and Other Stories. University of Nebraska Press, softcover, 1995, with ten stories. Ballantine 274K, paperback original, 1957, with seven stories. Several later Ballantine printings.
The Hanging Tree is a collection of ten tales by Dorothy M. Johnson written from 1942-57 and some of the best western fiction I’ve ever read. Johnson could pack movement, character and setting into a very few words without sounding packed, and she knew how to develop a tale with a feel for its implications as well as its actions.
The result is ten memorable vignettes of which “The Hanging Tree” — a great story by itself — is perhaps the least. I got a lot of pleasure from “Lost Sister,” a cryptic tale of a “rescued” captive, and “The Last Boast,” in which a condemned cowboy looks back on the best-and-worst thing he ever did, and there’s some laugh-out-loud prose in “I Woke Up Wicked.”
In all, a book to treasure and a writer to seek out again.
Editorial Comment: For more on the author of this collection, Dorothy M. Johnson, her Wikipedia entry is a good place to start.
April 13th, 2014 at 10:37 pm
THE HANGING TREE was made into a good western film starring Gary Cooper in 1959.
April 14th, 2014 at 12:12 pm
A couple of other good movies based on Johnson’s stories are A Man Called Horse and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Most of her stories appeared in the “slick” magazines such as THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, COLLIER’S and COSMOPOLITAN, but a couple appeared in ARGOSY, circa 1950-51, which maybe qualifies her as a pulp fiction writer..
April 14th, 2014 at 1:28 pm
I would say that she was not a pulp writer at all. ARGOSY in the early 1950’s was a quality men’s adventure magazine and paid rates close to the slick level. Size was 81/2 by 11. I consider ARGOSY’s pulp days to have ended when Munsey sold it to Popular Publications in the early 1940’s. Popular changed it into a sort of men’s slick magazine with quality fiction and articles.
April 14th, 2014 at 3:20 pm
I watch the film THE HANGING TREE at least once a year and have the poster (http://randall120.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/936full-the-hanging-tree-poster.jpg)
up in my room. Imagine my delight when I found that this fine story was not the best in the book!
April 14th, 2014 at 6:36 pm
Johnson was strictly a mainstream western writer, somewhere in the range of Guthie, Cunningham, and Manfred with a nod perhaps to Marie Sandoz. There is also a ‘novelization’ of Liberty Valence by screenwriter James Edward Grant (his name anyway).