Duel in the Sun

by Niven Busch

Overview

Spanish Bit Ranch is the insular domain of Senator Jackson McCanles; a kingdom carved from the Texas soil in the 1880's and containing thousands of acres of “steers and wire, mesa and windmills and horses, cap rock and barren trail and pleasant river shallows.” A way of life ruled by the Code of the Plains and carefully constructed to withstand the relentless path of progress and interfering outsiders.

But, despite their efforts, the Senator and Mrs. McCanles and their four sons are not destined to go on as they always had. Certainly not with the coming of the railroad and the arrival of a 12 year old Pearl Chavez.

Pearl is a poor niece only remotely related to Mrs. McCanles, but she is no ordinary girl. By eighteen, her brownish-green eyes, ropy black hair, and olive skin seasoned by the Texas sun, had captured the hearts of three young men; hearts soon gripped with jealousy and discontent. When young Pearl chooses the wild and irresponsible second son, Lewt—a match not sanctioned by the McCanles family—Lewt gets into a shooting scrape and has to leave the range and live as an outlaw. In the midst of his son's tempestuous affair, Senator McCanles, an astute but inflexible old-line rancher, finds himself caught in the controversy of the advancing railroad. However, his oldest son, a young and upcoming lawyer, also in love with Pearl, takes an opposing position, and the rift in the family's murky solidarity deepens—Mrs. McCanles begins to drink, sons are pitted against sons, and a father must face the unfaceable.

Duel in the Sun was made into a blockbuster technicolor motion picture by David O. Selznick, starring Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten and Gregory Peck, as well as Lionel Barrymore and Lillian Gish. Author and journalist, James M. Cain, calls Duel in the Sun "the best novel of the Southwest I have any recollection of.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940148595670
Publisher:	eNet Press Inc.
Publication date:	09/19/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	246
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Novelist, screenwriter and producer, Niven Busch, was, as David Shipman says, “associated with some interesting films at the time when movies were movies”. Busch was born in Manhattan on April 26, 1903, and died in San Francisco August 25, 1991. He was 88.
Busch’s father was born into a New York banking family, was a stock broker at times yet was in the film business and ran a night club in Paris; his mother was British. Niven’s childhood was spent in luxury in Oyster Bay, NY, and at a fashionable boarding school. He decided to become an author at the age of 14, when he again saw his name in print when his poem was published in his school magazine. Previously, at about age 9, St. Nicholas Magazine published a few of his little stores and poems in its section reserved for children’s compositions. Before he left for Princeton in 1921 he had already sold verses and sketches to such well-known magazines as McClure’s. He left Princeton before the end of his sophomore year when his father’s firm went broke. He soon connected with his cousin, Briton Hadden who was editor of the new Time magazine. He worked at Time for a number of years, becoming an editor himself. He was also contributing stories and profiles to Harold Ross’s budding The New Yorker. He owed much, he later confessed, to Ross’s tuition. His first book, Twenty-one Americans, a collection of portraits of current famous Americans which had appeared in The New Yorker, was published in 1931.
In 1932, realizing he had gone as far as he was likely to go as a New York-based magazine writer and editor, Busch decided Hollywood was the place to be, and he had a connection through his father, who was at one time in the motion picture distribution business with Lewis Selznick. And through that connection, Niven met Lewis’s son, David. It was David who brought Niven out to Hollywood.
David Selznick soon secured work for Busch at Warner Brothers, and Busch decamped to Los Angeles to write his first film, Howard Hawk’s The Crowd Roars (1932).