William MacCleod Raine

Raine was one of the greatest of the early western genre writers. His main publishers were Dillingham, Doubleday & for the longest time Houghton Mifflin, a publisher that did not have a western line per se but took on Raine for broader merits. His first western novel was Wyoming (1908); his last, issued posthumously, was The Young Tenderfoot (1958). With 85 books about the west, four of them nonfiction, he might be mistaken for a pulp hack. But the honesty, knowledge, & intellectuality that underlay his action & suspense stories raises his work above the common horde.

He was born in London June 22, 1871, but his family immigrated to America when he was only ten. He lived most of his life in the West. His claim to having been a cowboy is true enough, though ranchlife provided only a brief stint as he was mainly a Denver journalist, Seattle educator, & soon a full time writer. He died July 25, 1954.