Three Dog Tales: Old Yeller, Sounder, Savage Sam (Modern Classics) (Harperperennial Modern Classics)
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Three classic dog tales brought together in a single v...)
Three classic dog tales brought together in a single volume
Old Yeller
Winner of the Newbery Honor
When his father sets out on a cattle drive for the summer, fourteen-year-old Travis is left to take care of his mother, younger brother, and the family farm. In the wilderness of early frontier Texas, Travis faces his new and often dangerous responsibilities, with many adventures along the way, all with the help of the big yellow dog who comes to be his best friend.
Sounder
Winner of the John Newbery Medal
Sounder is a loyal family dog, determined to help his owners through thick and thin. This is the story of a great coon dog and the poor sharecroppers who own him, and of the courage and love that bind a black family together in the face of extreme prejudice from the outside world.
Savage Sam
In this sequel to Old Yeller, Travis and his younger brother are kidnapped by an Indian raiding party, and Savage Sam, the son of the beloved yellow dog, leads a frantic chase to bring them back.
("Gipson again has given us a purely wonderful trunk of Am...)
"Gipson again has given us a purely wonderful trunk of Americana, and one of those rare books to be enjoyed on many latitudes of brow elevation."--Chicago Sunday Tribune
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To the wild and fabulous country where the Rio Grande m...)
To the wild and fabulous country where the Rio Grande makes its big bend, J. O. Langford came in 1909 with his wife and daughter in search of health and a home. High on a bluff overlooking the spot where Tornillo Creek pours its waters into the turbulent Rio Grande, the Langfords built their home, a rude structure of adobe blocks in a land reputed to be inhabited only by bandits and rattlesnakes.
Big Bend is the story of the Langfords' life in the rugged and spectacularly beautiful country which they came to call their own. Langford's account is told with the help of Fred Gipson, author of Old Yeller and Hound Dog Man.
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When a novel like Huckleberry Finn, or The Yearling, co...)
When a novel like Huckleberry Finn, or The Yearling, comes along it defies customary adjectives because of the intensity of the respouse it evokes in the reader. Such a book, we submit, is Old Yeller; to read this eloquently simple story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country is an unforgettable and deeply moving experience.
(Relates the tale of the little red rooster Dick, who trai...)
Relates the tale of the little red rooster Dick, who trails a herd of longhorns to Dodge City with a group of cowhands and leads them on a wild chase after narrowly escaping from the cook
(Twelve-year-old Cotton Kinney has everything a boy could ...)
Twelve-year-old Cotton Kinney has everything a boy could want-except a dog. For Christmas, Cotton bought his dad a studded dog collar and his mom an enameled cake-mixing pan just the right size for feeding a dog. It didn't do any good. When Christmas comes, Cotton still doesn't get his dog. But Blackie Scantling, best coon hunter in the country, and his two coonhounds, Rock and Drum, come by for dinner one night. Blackie takes Cotton and his best friend Spud, and Spud's little feist dog Snuffy, on a series of adventures that include a show-down with a bull, a wrestling match with a turkey gobbler, and the search for a dog Cotton can call his own.
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Walt Coburn’s father pioneered in Montana Territory, jo...)
Walt Coburn’s father pioneered in Montana Territory, joined the Vigilantes who chased road agents, and eventually built up one of the biggest cow outfits in the young state. The Circle C Ranch spread over thirty thousand acres in northern Montana, near the town of Malta.
Walt is rather small for age fourteen—only “stirrup high” to his pony Snowflake—when he works on the Circle C and learns a lot from the tough cowboys, and from his own scrapes and falls. His summer vacation from school increases in excitement when Kid Curry and other members of the Wild Bunch loom on the horizon. Stirrup High conveys all the know-how and atmosphere of roughing it on a ranch in 1903.
Frederick Benjamin Gipson was an American author, novelist, journalist, and rancher.
Background
Gipson was born on February 7, 1908, near Mason, Texas, the son of Beckton Gipson and Emma Mayberry Dieschler. The Gipsons earned a hard living farming corn and cotton. Family stories of frontier life emphasized endurance, humor, justice, love of land and animals, and, on occasion, violence.
Education
Gipson attended public school in Mason, graduating in 1926. The high school annual published his first story, a tale about cattle rustlers, which was influenced by Gipson's love of pulp Western fiction. In 1933, still unemployed, Gipson decided to try college. In Austin his stories about Mason County life helped him receive top grades in English. He also took courses in journalism. Popular as a speaker, Gipson was named a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters in 1970.
Career
After completing a bookkeeping course in San Antonio, Gipson returned to Mason to work for a local grocer. Yearning to be a cowboy, he signed on in late 1927 for a nightmarish ten-day goat drive through almost continuous rain. Daunted, Gipson turned to breaking and driving mules. At twenty, he had his own team on a county road-building gang. In 1931, the Great Depression forced Gipson and his father to seek work as day laborers. That fall, Gipson's younger brother urged Fred to come with him to the University of Texas. His story "Hard-Pressed Sam" was published by the Southwest Review, and his columns began to appear in the university's Daily Texan. In 1936, he won a writing contest judged by author J. Frank Dobie and was elected president of the journalism society. Gipson left college in 1937 to be a reporter for Hart-Hankes Newspapers at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The chain soon made him a roving reporter, publishing his articles in three papers. In June 1940, after his honeymoon in Mexico, Gipson was fired from his newspaper job and took his wife to live at the family homestead near Mason. This experience became the basis for his 1950 novel, The Home Place. Early in 1941, Joe Small, a college friend who had become a literary agent, helped Gipson sell his Western stories to magazines, and by August 1942 he had earned enough to build a small dwelling on the family farm. In 1943, Gipson sold a story to Collier's for $500, and in 1944 Reader's Digest reprinted "My Kind of Man. " That November, Donald Day, editor of the Southwest Review, arranged a meeting between Gipson and Colonel Zack Miller, former proprietor of the 101 Wild West Show in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Gipson collected one thousand pages of notes for a biography. Though he had little confidence in the completed book, Miller was delighted. Fabulous Empire: Colonel Zack Miller's Story was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1946. Gipson then returned to an earlier novel about Charlie Sanders, a hill country character with whom he had hunted as a boy. The manuscript went to Houghton, where it stayed nine months until the publisher suggested revisions, which Gipson refused. Meanwhile, Day helped Gipson get a job on the Rocky Mountain Empire magazine. The Gipsons left for Colorado in February 1948, but by summer, unhappy with life in Durango, they returned to Texas. The Charlie Sanders novel was accepted by Harper in June and published as Hound-Dog Man (1949). The Book-of-the-Month Club guaranteed Gipson $25, 000, then a princely sum. Despite this success, Gipson was troubled by fears of inadequacy. A new novel was refused by Harper. In 1950, however, the publisher brought out The Home Place, which became a best-seller and brought Gipson $27, 500 in film rights. In 1951, another novel was completed but rejected by Harper, and Gipson's doubts again grew. In 1952, despite publication of Big Bend: A Homesteader's Story by the University of Texas Press, Gipson found himself depressed about both his literary future and the drought that for the next five years frustrated his plans to replant his acreage. Many of his stories were rejected by publishers. In 1953, he and Joe Small started True West, a pulp magazine of nonfiction Western stories, which Gipson edited. Gipson's fortunes rose again. In 1953, his biography of Ed ("Fat") Alford, Cowhand, was published to good reviews, and a children's novel, The Trail-Driving Rooster, was accepted by Harper. The following year, Harper also bought Recollection Creek, a novel based on several of Gipson's earlier stories. In 1955, the television sale of his story "Brush Roper" took Gipson to Los Angeles as screenwriter. In October 1955, he wrote to Harper suggesting a dog story based on an event in his grandfather's life, and by January he had completed a manuscript of Old Yeller (1956). Its popularity was immediate. Harper promised him $35, 000, and in June, Walt Disney paid $50, 000 for the film rights. Financially secure, Gipson now began to have health problems. In May he experienced intense back pain, which continued intermittently all his life. Later, in Los Angeles to write the screenplay for Old Yeller, he developed an ulcer, aggravated by drinking and his chronic unhappiness whenever he was away from the hill country of Mason. He continued to write. His next published book was The Cow Killers (1956), a powerful work in a narrative style new for Gipson. It was about Mexican peasants facing the government's extermination of farm animals with hoof-and-mouth disease. Despite the end of the drought in 1957 and the success of Disney's Old Yeller in 1958, Gipson was unhappy. Three of his stories had been turned down, and he angrily objected to plot changes Twentieth Century-Fox made in filming Hound-Dog Man. In the period 1959-1960, Gipson fell into such serious depression that he agreed to shock treatments. Recovering, he was named president of the Texas Institute of Letters in 1960 and that summer began a sequel to Old Yeller. Savage Sam (1962) was completed in May 1961, and in October, Gipson went once more to Hollywood to write the screenplay for Disney. Some weeks after his return in April 1962, his dog, the model for Savage Sam, was found clubbed to death. Despondent over this and other disappointments, In his last years Gipson, in poor health, wrote magazine pieces and worked on several manuscripts. He died at his ranch near Mason. Among his papers were six manuscript novels, two of which, Little Arliss (1978) and Curly and the Wild Boar (1979), were published posthumously.
(Twelve-year-old Cotton Kinney has everything a boy could ...)
Connections
In 1939, Gipson met Tommie Wynn of San Angelo. They were married January 23, 1940, and had two children. Gipson's elder son Mike committed suicide. Two years later, Fred and Tommie Gipson were divorced, chiefly because of his drinking. In 1967, he hired Angelina Torres as his secretary, whom he married on December 17. They were divorced six months later.