Harry Lawton

Born on December 11, 1927, Harry Lawton grew up in Long Beach, California where he developed a passion for reading and writing during childhood. After high school, Lawton enrolled at University of California in Berkeley to study Journalism. There, he also wrote for its newspapers and magazines. Always a visionary, he opened the famous Haunted Bookstore in Berkeley, which specialized in rare Western Americana. Harry then moved to Riverside where he was hired as a reporter for The Press-Enterprise. While writing for the newspaper, he got interested in a story about Willie Boy, a Pauite-Chemehuevi Indian who falls into a forbidden love story. The tragic true story got Lawton's attention immediately. He then spent the next three years researching on the Morongo Indian Reservation in the California Desert. The result became the award winning novel "Willie Boy: a Desert Manhunt" (1960) which was later made into a movie, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), starring Robert Redfor... [Details Intro]