Caroline Lockhart: Her Life and Legacy

Abstract

Writer Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962) lived a life as colorfully picaresque and as successful as any of her bestselling Western adventure novels or her widely quoted newspaper column. Her popular novels, championing the region and the Old West culture of which she became a part, were compared favorably to those of Owen Wister, and one, The Fighting Shepherdess, was made into a movie. She also attracted national attention as the owner-editor of the Cody Enterprise. H. L. Mencken praised her outspokenness as an investigative reporter and as a critic of Prohibition, and Christopher Morley borrowed her witticisms verbatim for his column in the New York Post. Lockhart's devilishly honest humor, he said, could make the human lung crow like Chanticleer. Although her writings are little known today, Lockhart left a body of work that reveals her to be a first-class interpreter of the West in a time of economic and social transition. Necah Stewart Furman's informative and compelling literary biography intersperses a lively chronicling of Lockhart's life with an objective and probing analysis of her books, short stories, and articles. Furman has made thorough and judicious use of newspapers, interviews, and manuscripts, including personal correspondence and diaries, to detail the western sojourns, the civic controversies, the love affairs, and the real-life adventures that honed Lockhart's point of view and formed the basis of her fiction. From her Kansas childhood, to her early success as a reporter in Boston and Philadelphia, to the excitement of making it big as a writer-journalist, civic leader, and rancher based mainly in Cody, Wyoming, a remarkable portrait emerges of a woman who brokeconventions and made her own mark not only in a frontier setting but in a primarily masculine literary genre.