1908-1973 · American writer of novels about frontier and ranch life in Texas
About Fred Gipson
Fred Gipson (1908-1973) was a Texas writer born near Mason, in the Hill Country where Old Yeller is set. He worked as a farmhand and newspaper reporter before turning to fiction and nonfiction about frontier and ranch life; his novel Hound-Dog Man (1949) was his first major success. Old Yeller (1956) received a Newbery Honor, and he continued the Coates family's story in Savage Sam (1962). He also helped write the screenplay for Walt Disney's 1957 film of Old Yeller.
Old Yeller is narrated by Travis Coates, who looks back on the year he was fourteen, in the late 1860s, on his family's homestead near the settlement of Salt Licks in the Texas Hill Country. After the Civil War cattle money is scarce, so Papa joins the other men of the settlement on a long drive to sell cattle in Kansas, leaving Travis as the man of the place with Mama and his little brother, Arliss.