#THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS NOVEL SERIES#
Wayne (1907-1979) had caught the tail end of the silent period as an uncredited extra and graduated to leading roles in a series of black-and-white "B" (low-Budget) Western Saugus rancher Harry Carey portrays the title character in 1941's "The Shepherd of the Hills" from Paramount Pictures. The last, soon to be released by Paramount, is a Technicolor version of "The Shepherd of the Hills" (on opposite page), which, for all its mountain scenic splendor, has even in a restrained adaptation, the dated sentimentality of its 34-year-old book. Of his 17 novels, eight have been made into movies, some of them twice. But a generation of readers as yet unfamiliar with the austerities of a Hemingway, a Dos Passos or a Faulkner found such moral tales as "The Winning of Barbara Worth," "The Calling of Dan Matthews" and "The Re-creation of Brian Kent" so engrossing that, all in all, 10,000,000 copies of Wright's books were sold. The action goes galloping along, heedless of reality, from thrilling gun duel to breathless escape, from knock-down fist fight to hair-trigger rescue.
The women are paragons of youth, health, beauty, charm and purity. The characters are stalking cardboard figures, crudely symbolizing weakness or strength, courage or cowardice, good or evil, each brushed in solid with a single flat paint. Otherwise, to modern concepts, these works seem almost bare of merits. Like other bestsellers of that happy decade (Gene Stratton Porter's "Freckles:" 2,000,000 copies John Fox Jr.'s "Trail of the Lonesome Pine:" 1,255,-000), Harold Bell Wright's books were hearty, naive melodramas of the big out-of-doors whose chief virtue was that they brought to a heterogeneous people the beauty of the remote corners of their land. "The Shepherd of the Hills," four years later, rolled up a sensational sale of 2,000,000.
When published between covers, "That Printer of Udell's," to everyone's surprise, sold 500,000 copies. An itinerant sign painter turned preacher, he had written his first novel as a parable to be delivered in weekly installments from his pulpit. It was in 1908 that he first started on his strange and astonishing literary career. But to their parents he will be remembered as a landmark in an era now coated with the shimmer of nostalgia, a beautiful bygone day when peace and prosperity seemed like permanent and indestructible blessings. To a generation coming of age in a fearfully complex world his name brings, at best, a faint and amused smile of doubtful recognition. The benign old man working at the card table below is writing his 18th novel. "Shepherd of the Hills" Filmed After 34 Years.
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