10 September 2019

Mid-Century Modern in the Emerald City

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After the original publisher of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz went bankrupt, Bobbs-Merrill became the book’s one and only US publisher. At...
02 September 2019

The Rise of the “Oxford Comma“

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A weekend Twitter conversation with editor Harold Underdown and picture book creator Debbie Ridpath Ohi set me digging for the origin of the...
29 August 2019

Thundering Herds

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The Thundering Herd was another Zane Grey novel made into a movie by Paramount, and then remade by the same studio with the young Randolp...
26 August 2019

Billy Lee: “one of the heaps magnificent young actor”

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Last week I mentioned Billy Lee, Hollywood child actor of the 1930s and early 1940s. I really can’t improve on the profile of him from t...
24 August 2019

The Journey from Fighting Caravans to Wagon Wheels

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In 1929 Zane Grey published The Fighting Caravans , a novel about a scout who leads wagon trains across Native American lands to the Orego...
20 August 2019

Television the Great and Terrible

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The MGM Wizard of Oz has gone through three stages defined by how we the public got to watch it. First was the reception that the film...
19 August 2019

Rethinking a Decision at Sundown

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I thought I’d watched all seven movies in the “Ranown Cycle” of westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, most pro...
17 August 2019

Only Two Plots?

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The two prose stories about Jex and Ticca exemplify the adage that “there are only two plots: A stranger rides into town, and A man goes on ...
15 August 2019

“Just” Another Adventure with Jex and Ticca

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Last fall I shared news of my story “Relief: A Tale of the Jitney” being published in volume 5 of the Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide a...
11 August 2019

Robin and Gender Shifts in American Naming

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Last year the Life of Words blog discussed how over time many American names have flipped from being predominantly male to predominantly fe...