John H. Reese

John Henry Reese (18 December 1910 – 15 August 1981) was an American author, mainly of Western and Crime Fiction. He won the prestigious^[1] 1952 New York Herald Tribune award for his first children's book, Big Mutt. He produced more than 40 Western novels and more than three hundred short stories.^[2] His first novel Sheehan's Mill, not of the Western genre, was published by Doubleday in 1943, during wartime publishing restrictions.^[3]

Reese was born in Sweetwater, Nebraska, and died in Santa Maria, California. He attended school in Nebraska and Kansas. "I was the eldest of six children of a very poor couple. My father was a horse breaker and former cavalryman; my mother was the daughter of a frontier blacksmith and woodworker. I may be the last professional writer who talked to those survivors of the 1880s and 1890s and who grew up in the same environment. It was a specialized education for one job alone, the one I have."^[4] He married Margaret Smith in 1938, was divorced, and married Norma Spivack in 1962. Altogether he had seven children, one of whom was adopted. In addition to writing, John H. Reese worked for the U.S. Department of Internal Revenue and as a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner in California and as a free-lance reporter for newspapers in Mexico. His first Western novel was Signal Guns At Sunup using the pseudonym John Jo Carpenter. He is survived by his granddaughter Kimberly who is also a published author.