Chester William Harrison

Harrison worked as a portrait photographer and a builder of house trailers where he had his first fictional story published in 1936. His first novel Boothill Trail was published in 1940. His Collier's Weekly two part magazine story Petticoat Brigade was purchased by Audie Murphy and co-produced with Harry Joe Brown as the 1957 film The Guns of Fort Petticoat. Harrison did a novelization of the screenplay and the original stories under the same title in the same year. Under the name Will Hickok he wrote three western novels: Web of Gunsmoke (1955), The Restless Gun (1959) and Trail of the Gun (1960), the latter two tie-ins with the American television show The Restless Gun. His non-fiction works include Conservation, the Challenge of Reclaiming our Plundered Land, Find a Career in Auto Mechanics, Here Is Your Career: The Building Trades and Here is Your Career, Auto Mechanic.