Sandhills Boy - Elmer Kelton

I warn you, I’m going to digress a little here. Elmer Kelton was my father’s favorite author, although I’d like to think that my dad thought my books were pretty good, too. But Elmer’s work really struck a chord with him. They were roughly the same age, both came from a rural Texas background and had cowboyed some as kids, both were in the army and stationed in Austria right after World War II, and as it turned out, they had some mutual acquaintances. So when I took my dad with me to the Western Writers of America convention in Jackson, Wyoming in 1992, he was excited to meet Elmer, who I had known since ’86.

Now, my dad was always supportive – in his way – of my desire to be a writer. Oh, he thought I was crazy, no doubt about that. He didn’t see how anybody from our small town could ever make a living writing books. Writers were all folks who lived somewhere else. But he did everything in his power to see to it that I had the chance to succeed or fail on my own, and nobody can ask for more than that. Even after I broke in and started selling books, my dad didn’t quite grasp what was going on.

But then, at that WWA convention, when he saw Elmer greet me by name and shake my hand, my dad’s attitude changed. By golly, if I was friends with Elmer Kelton, then there had to be something to this writing business after all. He got to talk to Elmer at length, and that was when they discovered they knew some of the same people and had been to many of the same places, in both Austria and West Texas. It was fun watching them talk, because they obviously spoke the same language.

We spent that weekend hanging around not only with Elmer but many other writers, editors, and agents as well, and from that point on, my dad was more interested in the writing business than ever and managed to pick up quite a few of the intricacies of it. We spent hours talking about it, and those were some great times.

Now, back to Elmer Kelton. SANDHILLS BOY is his autobiography, and it’s a fine book, written in his usual straightforward style. He begins by covering several generations of his family that came before him, painting a vivid picture of their interaction with the somewhat harsh West Texas landscape, then launches into a lengthy section about his boyhood on the ranch that his father managed. It’s good stuff, humorous and poignant in turn, and along the way he mentions his mother reading the pulp RANCH ROMANCES, a magazine that would prove to be quite important to him later on.

The second half of SANDHILLS BOY deals primarily with Kelton’s service as a combat infantryman in Germany during World War II, and then his romance with Anni Lipp while he was stationed in Austria during the year following the war. They weren’t able to get married until after Kelton returned to America and was discharged from the army, and then only after another year of dealing with all the bureaucratic red tape involved. The final few chapters center around their lives since then, including Kelton’s duel careers as an agriculture journalist and a novelist.

This is not really a literary autobiography. Kelton mentions making his first sale to RANCH ROMANCES and touches in passing on becoming a novelist. It would have been fine with me if he had gone into more detail about that part of his life – I’m a sucker for the “And then I wrote”-style of autobiography, although I know some people don’t care for it – but hey, it’s Elmer’s book, and Elmer’s life, for that matter, and he can write about what he wants to. Especially when it’s in such eloquent, compelling prose. His unassuming personality really shines through in this book. There’s no sense that he considers himself any more special or important than any of the other cowboys, ranch women, or soldiers he describes. That’s one of the things that makes him the man he is, and one reason this book gets a high recommendation from me.