Frederick Benjamin Gipson

--author of Old Yeller

Frederick Gipson

Frederick Benjamin Gipson lived from 1908 to 1973.

He was born on a farm near Mason, Texas, on February 7, 1908, the son of Beck and Emma Gipson. He graduated from Mason High School in 1926.

After he graduated from high school, Fred worked at a variety of farming and ranching jobs.

There he wrote for the Daily Texan and the Ranger news-papers. He left school before he graduated to become a reporter for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in 1937.

He enrolled

at the University of

Texas in 1933.

A year later (in 1938) he worked for the San Angelo Standard-Times, then briefly for the Denver Post.

Soon after he began to sell stories and articles to pulp Western magazines and to better-known magazines such as Liberty and Look.By 1944 Gipson had published a story in the Southwest Review.

Many of his stories appearing in that journal in the 1940’s were models for the longer works of fiction that followed. Gipson eventually became known as a Hill Country writer.

His first full-length book was The Fabulous Empire: Colonel Zack Miller’s Story. It was published in 1946, but it was only moderately successful—with only 25,000 copies sold.

His second book, Hound-Dog Man, was published in 1949. It sold over 250,000 copies in its first year of publication and became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Many critics and readers think Hound-Dog Man was Gipson’s best work.

Other books that followed include• The Home Place (1950)• Big Bend: A

Homesteader’s Story (1952)

• Cowhand: The Story of a Working Cowboy (1953)

• The Trail-Driving Rooster (1955)

• Recollection Creek (1955)

Gipson published Old Yeller in 1956. He considered this novel his best work. It sold nearly three million copies by 1973. Set in the Hill Country in the 1860’s, it tells the story of several months in the life of a fourteen-year-old boy left in charge while his father is away. Old Yeller, a stray dog adopted by the boy, helps the formidable task of protecting the family in the frontier wilderness.

Old Yeller was named a Newbery Honor Book, an ALA Notable Children’s Book, and won the William Allen White Children's Book Award (Kansas).

The book was made into a movie by Walt Disney studios in 1957.

Savage Sam, the sequel to Old Yeller, was published in 1962 and also made into a Walt Disney film. In this book the boys take off after a band of Apache kidnappers who have kidnapped the neighbor children.

Gipson was president of the Texas Institute of Letters in 1956. His first marriage, which ended in divorce, was to Tommie Wynn; they had two sons. In 1967 he was married to Angelina Torres.

Gipson died at his ranch near Mason on August 14, 1973. By a special proclamation of the governor, he was buried in the State Cemetery in Austin.

His tombstone reads:

“HIS BOOKS ARE HIS

MONUMENT.”

According to one critic, Gipson “made the term Southwest literature legitimate and meaningful” and “accomplished the rare but admirable feat of turning the bits and pieces of folklore into myth.”

His novels were translated into Danish, French German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Two posthumous [after his death] publications were Little Arliss (1978) and Curly and the Wild Boar (1979).

[all information taken from The Handbook of Texas Online]