Tom W. Blackburn was born on the T.O. Ranch near Raton, New Mexico. The T.O. controlled such a vast domain it had its own internal railroad system and was later used as the setting for Blackburn’s novel, Raton Pass (1950). Blackburn first began writing Western stories for pulp magazines and, in the decade from 1938 to 1948, he contributed over 300 stories of varying lengths to such outstanding magazines as Dime Western, Lariat Story Magazine, Western Story, and Star Western. Also during the 1940s he worked as a screenwriter for various Hollywood studios, a circumstance that prepared him to adapt his own Western novels into screenplays, beginning with his first, Short Grass (1947). Blackburn’s longest affiliation was with the Disney studio where, for a time, he was best known for having written the lyrics for “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” a popular television and then theatrical series based on the exploits of this legendary frontiersman. In his Western novels, Blackburn tended toward stories based on historical episodes, such as Navajo Canyon (1952) and A Good Day to Die (1967). Perhaps his finest achievement as a novelist is the five-part Stanton saga focused on the building of a great ranch in New Mexico from the Spanish period to the end of the 19th century. Following a stroke, Blackburn came to spend the years prior to his death in 1992 living with his daughter Stephanie in Colorado, surrounded by the mountains he had always loved. Tom W. Blackburn’s Western fiction is concerned with the struggles, torments, joys, and the rare warmth that comes from companionships of the soul, the very stuff which is as imperishable in its human significance as the “sun-dark skins of the clean blood of the land” which he celebrated and transfixed in shimmering images and unforgettable characters.

Publications:

The Trail of Whitened Skulls Tom W. Blackburn ISBN: 08439-5992-4 $5.99 Club Price: $4.19 OUT OF STOCK