Sandhills Boy: The Winding Trail of a Texas Writer

Sandhills Boy is the story of "a freckle-faced country boy, green as a gourd," growing up in the wild sandhills of West Texas and becoming author of many well-loved and critically-acclaimed Western novels: The Time It Never Rained, The Good Old Boys, The Day the Cowboys Quit, and some 50 others.

The son of a working cowboy and ranch foreman, Elmer Kelton learned at an early age that he had no talent for horses nor any of the cowboy’s trade . . . but he did have a knack for story-telling. He graduated from the University if Texas and before becoming "the greatest of all Western writers" (by vote of the Western Writers of America, Inc,) was a soldier in Europe and a journalist in Texas.

Kelton writes with warm, nostalgic humor of his life in ranch and oil patch Texas during the Great Depression of his service in WW2 in France, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, and of the romantic circumstances which changed his life in the village of Ebensee, Austria. At a boat landing there, in October, 1945, he met a young woman, Anni Lipp, who became his wife and remained by his side for 60 years.

Filled with Kelton’s sly humor and memorable anecdotes, Sandhills Boy is destined to be a classic in Western autobiography, a companion to Charlie Siringo’s A Texas Cowboy and We Pointed Them North by Edward. C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott.