Paul Wellman

The Wellman family spent their early years in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola); Paul Wellman was born in Oklahoma but moved to Africa at six months, and his younger bother Manley Wade Wellman, also a writer, was born in the town of Kamundongo, where their father was a medical missionary. Both boys spoke Bantu fluently. The family moved to DC when they were still young, and they lived in this house and attended grade school in DC. After their parents’ divorce, they moved with their mother to Kansas.

Paul Wellman would remain in the Great Plains, taking a job at age 14 as a ranch hand each summer until he completed college, after which time he began work as a journalist for the Wichita Beacon, the Wichita Eagle and the Kansas City Star, while writing western novels on the side. Among his 33 novels are: Death on the Prairie (1934), Angel with Spurs (192), The Iron Mistress (1951), Jericho’s Daughters (1956), Gold in California (1958), The Greatest Cattle Drive (1964), and The Buckstones (1967).

Paul worked for two and a half years as a Hollywood screenwriter, beginning in 1944. One of his novels, The Walls of Jericho (1947), became a best seller. Another, The Comancheros (1952), was made into a 1961 film starring John Wayne.