Shane

Summary

Shane is a short Western novel in sixteen chapters, told years afterward by Bob Starrett, who was about eleven in the summer of 1889 when a stranger rode into his family's Wyoming valley. The rider, dressed in dark, fine clothes and calling himself only Shane, stops at the homestead of Joe Starrett, Bob's father, and Joe's wife, Marian. Joe, the steady leader of the small farmers who have taken up land along the valley, offers him work, and Shane stays on as a hired man. He turns out to be a tireless worker. In the novel's most famous scene, Joe and Shane spend a long afternoon chopping and heaving at a huge old stump that Joe has fought for years, until together they tear it out of the ground. The homesteaders are under pressure from Luke Fletcher, a rancher who has run cattle over the open range and wants the valley back. When Shane goes into town to Grafton's store, Fletcher's cowhand Chris taunts him for ordering soda pop, and Shane walks away; the valley takes it for cowardice, and Bob is ashamed. Shane later returns, fights Chris in the saloon and breaks his arm. Fletcher sends a larger crew, led by his foreman Morgan, and Shane and Joe fight them together in Grafton's in a long, brutal brawl that the two men win. Shane, though, keeps his gun put away, while showing Bob how to handle it and warning him about what a gun is for. Fletcher then brings in Stark Wilson, a hired gunman, who goads the hot-tempered homesteader Ernie Wright into drawing and shoots him dead. Fletcher offers to buy Joe out; Joe decides he must go into town and face Fletcher himself. Shane, knowing Joe cannot match Wilson, puts on his old gunman's clothes and, when Joe will not stand aside, knocks him unconscious with his pistol and rides to town alone. Bob runs after him and watches from the shadows at Grafton's as Shane kills Wilson in a fast draw and then shoots Fletcher, who has been waiting above with a gun. Wounded, Shane tells Bob to go home and that there will be no more guns in the valley, and rides away, never to be seen again. Joe, grieving, thinks of leaving the farm, but Marian persuades him to stay, and even Chris comes to ask for work. Schaefer, an Eastern newspaper editor, first published the story as Rider from Nowhere, a three-part serial in Argosy in 1946; Houghton Mifflin issued the revised and expanded novel in 1949, and George Stevens's 1953 film starring Alan Ladd made it famous.

Top Lessons

• A man can try to change

  Shane comes to the valley to live as a farmhand and puts his gun away. Schaefer takes his wish seriously, and the ending asks whether a man's past can be left behind or only used, once, for others' good.

• Work that builds a friendship

  Joe and Shane become friends over the stump, not over words. Shared labour on a hard job teaches each man what the other is worth.

• Courage and the right use of force

  Shane tells Bob a gun is a tool, as good or bad as the man who uses it. The book separates Wilson's killing for pay from Shane's fight to protect a family, while counting the cost of both.

• Seeing a hero through a child's eyes

  Bob tells the story as a man remembering what he saw as a boy. His admiration shapes how Shane appears, and his mother's and father's reactions show more than he understood at the time.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

There is little medicine in the novel, which has no doctor in it, but the violence is plain and physical. Chris's arm is broken in the saloon fight; the brawl with Morgan's crew leaves Joe and Shane battered and bleeding, and Marian tends their injuries at home; Ernie Wright is shot dead; and Shane rides away with a bullet wound whose seriousness Bob, and the reader, never learn. On the frontier of 1889 such injuries were dressed at home or not at all. A medical reader may note the novel's restraint: the narrator remembers the wounds as a child saw them, without clinical detail.

• Chapters 6-8

  Shane breaks Chris's arm; the brawl in Grafton's with Morgan's men, and Marian dressing Joe's and Shane's injuries afterward.

• Chapters 9-11

  Stark Wilson goads Ernie Wright into drawing and kills him.

• Chapters 15-16

  The gunfight at Grafton's; Shane, wounded, rides away.