Stanley Vestal

Stanley Vestal studied at Southwestern Oklahoma State University and Merton College. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is history, cultural history and English. Employment is recorded with University of Oklahoma. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship and Rhodes Scholarship.

• Name — Stanley Vestal • Birth Name — Walter Stanley Vestal • Occupation — Author: Books of the Old West, including Dodge City, Queen of the Cowtowns Professor of English at University of Oklahoma • Born — 15 August 1887 • Birthplace — Severy, Kansas, U.S. • Died — 25 December 1957 • Place of death — Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S. • Resting Place — Custer National Cemetery Big Horn County, Montana • Spouse — Isabel Jones Campbell • Children — Two daughters • Education — Southwestern Oklahoma State University Merton College, Oxford

Vestal was born to Walter Mallory Vestal and the former Isabella "Daisy" Wood near Severy in Greenwood County in southeastern Kansas. Vestal's father died when he was young. His mother remarried, and Vestal took the legal surname Campbell from his stepfather, James Robert Campbell. About 1889, the Campbell family relocated to Guthrie in the newly established Oklahoma Territory, where he learned Native American customs from his boyhood playmates, knowledge which would later be useful in his writing career. In 1903, Vestal graduated from the new institution, Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford. His stepfather was the first president of the college. Vestal was Oklahoma's first Rhodes Scholar. He earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in English from Oxford University in England. Vestal taught for three years at Male High School in Louisville, Kentucky, before he became a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, where he became known for his courses in creative writing. He temporarily left the university on three occasions, as a captain in an artillery regiment during World War I, as a Guggenheim Fellow from 1930 to 1931, and under a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1946. Between 1927 and his death on Christmas Day 1957 from a heart attack in Oklahoma City, Vestal wrote more than twenty books, some novels, poems, and as many as one hundred articles about the Old West. He is interred as Walter S. Campbell at the Custer National Cemetery in Big Horn County, Montana.