Katharine Newlin Burt


Katharine Newlin Burt was an American novelist and film scenarist. She was a prolific author of Westerns and other novels, with a publishing career that spanned more than 60 years. At least seven of Burt's published works were adapted to film, and she authored the original screen stories for two more films.

Life

Katharine Newlin was born to Thomas Shipley Newlin and Julia Maria Newlin on September 6, 1882, in Fishkill Landing, New York. Newlin began writing short stories while in kindergarten in Munich.
Newlin married writer Maxwell Struthers Burt in 1912, adding his last name to her own. The couple had one son, Nathaniel Burt and one daughter, Julia. The Burts lived four months of the year in the eastern U.S., but spent the rest of the time at their "real home," the Bar B C Dude Ranch, a thousand-acre cattle ranch at the foot of the Tetons in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Katharine Newlin Burt died in June 1977 in Princeton, New Jersey and was buried in Jackson, Wyoming.

Critical legacy

Norris Wilson Yates notes that Burt wrote both formula and non-formula Westerns, and argues that she "excels in evoking Western landscape as a force in the lives and feelings of her characters." Victoria Lamont writes that Burt's The Branding Iron participates in a "radical, though still deeply problematic, feminism," attention to which should change the way we think about "the importance of western mythology in women's literary history." The Branding Iron, along with two other women's Westerns, "participate in a shift in Anglo-American feminist discourse as American feminism decoupled from the abolition movement and became racially divided."

Novels

Filmography