Archives West Finding Aid

Jack (John Woolf) O'Connor was born in Nogales, Arizona, on January 22, 1902. He spent his formative years in Tempe, Arizona; in December 1917, at the age of 15, he enlisted in the U. S. Army. Owing to a slight case of tuberculosis he was discharged from the 158th Infantry Regiment in late January 1918. Upon recovering from his illness, according to John O'Connor, "I was restless, didn't know what I wanted to do, so I joined the Navy on a two year enlistment in 1919." ( The Arizonian, March 13, 1969, p. 22)

He served aboard an old coal-burning destroyer and the battleship U.S.S. Arkansas. The Navy provided the needed perspective on life and he emerged from the service with a desire to get an education: "I saw how hopeless the lives of my uneducated shipmates were." ( The Arizonian, March 13, 1969, p.22.) He entered Arizona State Teachers College at Flagstaff (present day Northern Arizona University) in the fall of 1921; he completed the two year degree program in 1923. Deciding to continue his education, he transferred to the University of Arizona for the 1923-1924 academic year. Dissatisfied with the U of A, he transferred again and completed his bachelor of arts degree at the University of Arkansas in 1925. The year 1927 proved to be eventful for O'Connor: he finished a masters degree from the University of Missouri after two years of graduate work, married Eleanor Bradford Barry whom he had met while attending the University of Arkansas, and got his first teaching job as an associate professor of English at Sul Ross College in Alpine, Texas.

By the mid-1920s, writing had become part of his life. He worked on local newspapers from 1924 through 1931--while he was both a student and a teacher--and became the Associated Press correspondent for southwest Texas in the Alpine region. In the summer of 1929, he finished his first novel, Conquest, a story of the Arizona frontier. Published by Harper in 1930, it was reviewed favorably throughout the nation as a first effort. One Phoenix newspaper critic wrote, however, that because of his portrayal of the Arizona frontier, if O'Connor ever showed up at the annual Arizona Pioneers Society picnic he would be horsewhipped, if indeed not hanged, drawn and quartered. (Jack O'Connor, " Hail and Farewell, Outdoor Life, May 1972, pp. 32-33.) The success of his first novel afforded him a certain amount of prestige and enabled him to return to Flagstaff and Arizona State Teachers College as an assistant professor of English and public relations officer in 1931. It was in 1931 that he published his first outdoor article, " Rifles and Cartridges for Southwestern Game. After having been rejected by the American Rifleman, O'Connor was successful on his second try with Sports Afield. This led to a number of articles in various outdoor magazines, but it was not until May 1934 that he made his first appearance in Outdoor Life with a conservation piece entitled Arizona's Antelope Problem.

During the decade from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, O'Connor maintained both his writing and academic careers. In the fall of l934, O'Connor moved on to the University of Arizona as the university's first associate professor of journalism. He was to remain at the U of A until 1945. On leave during the academic year 1937-1938, O'Connor produced about 18 articles for Outdoor Life; completed his second novel, Boom Town, a story of the Arizona mining frontier; and put together a book entitled Game in the Desert, a compilation of earlier magazine pieces on varous aspects of hunting in the Southwest. While at the University of Arizona, O'Connor became a regular contributor to Outdoor Life with his monthly column, " Getting the Range;" in 1941 he was made gun editor of the magazine. He resigned from the university faculty in 1945 to devote all his energies to writing. In 1948, he moved his family to Lewiston, Idaho, because, as he later remarked, "... the great growth of Arizona annoyed me to the extent that I sold our place in Tuscon and we picked up and moved up here..." He liked Lewiston "...because there is good big game hunting nearby and because there is superb upland [bird] hunting..." (Letter from O'Connor to Jack Pearson, October 31, 1954. O'Connor Papers, Box 3, Folder 65.)

Although O'Connor made Lewiston his permanent home, he was often away, hunting exotic animals in the far off corners of the earth. From the 1940s through the early 1970s, O'Connor stalked his prey on four continents (North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia), and in such places as Rhodesia, Kenya, Tanzania, Tanganyika, India, Iran, Scotland, Spain, Italy, Mexico, the Yukon, Alberta, British Columbia, Alaska, and most of the Western United States. Sheep hunting was his passion and he was only the fifth man to achieve two "grand slams" of all four varieties of North American sheep--Desert Big Horn, Rocky Mountain Big Horn, Dall, and Stone. At one time, O'Connor held the No. 10 in Stone and No. 12 in Dall trophies in the world records. (New York Times, Tuesday, January 24, 1978, p. 28, col. 3.)

O'Connor enjoyed his work and often commented on his good fortune. In his final piece as Shooting Editor of Outdoor Life, O'Connor wrote: "I have been a very lucky man. I came along at just about the right time." There was a growing interest in outdoor recreation, especially after World War II. This increased interest meant larger circulations for the outdoor magazines. The bigger reading audience attracted more advertising, which, as O'Connor observed, allowed the magazines to "pay more for jobs such as mine." (O'Connor, " Hail and Farewell, p. 102.) Fast and relatively cheap air travel in the 1950s and 1960s made distant hunting grounds accessible to the average hunter. But as O'Connor ended his career in the decade of the 1970s, game laws, exorbitant hunting and licensing fees, and restrictions imposed by conservation minded governments limited access to game animals. Equipment cost became prohibitive; travel and guide costs increased. The big game hunter's era was coming to an end. O'Connor lamented the end of the world as he knew it. He understood that the only way the average hunter would experience the dangers of an Indian tiger hunt, or the exhilaration of an African safari, was through the writings of men such as himself, those few men who were privileged and fortunate enough to be paid for doing what other men could only dream about.

O'Connor shared his experiences in literally hundreds of articles in Outdoor Life and other magazines, as well as over fourteen books, many of which went to several editions. His most popular hunting and shooting books included: The Rifle Book (1949, 3rd edition, 1978), The Complete Book of Rifles and Shotguns (1961, 2nd edition, 1965), The Big Game of North America (1962), The Art of Hunting Big Game in North America (1967, 2nd edition, 1977), and The Best of Jack O'Connor (1977).

In 1972, the year O'Connor retired from Outdoor Life, he received the Winchester-Western Outdoorsman of the Year Award (for 1971). As the recipient of this award he was selected by a national poll of more than 5,000 outdoor writers and conservationists. This award recognized O'Connor's journalistic contributions to not only good sportsmanship and marksmanship, but also to practical conservation practices. Earlier in his career, 1957, O'Connor received the Weatherby Big Game Trophy of the Year Award "for his outstanding sportsmanship and great achievements in the hunting field..." (Weatherby Big Game Trophy Award certificate. O'Connor Papers, Box 11, scrapbook.)

Critical acclaim for O'Connor's outdoor and hunting writings was surpassed only by the overwhelming response to his first attempt at autobiography Horse and Buggy West: A Boyhood on the Last Frontier, published in 1969 by Alfred A. Knopf, recounts O'Connor's boyhood years on the Arizona frontier in the first two decades of the 20th century. In a letter to O'Connor in June 1969, Angus Cameron, O'Connor's editor at Knopf, expressed his faith in Horse and Buggy West: "In terms of critical response... you have proved that you had the overall perspective to encompass local nostalgia and sophisticated criticism." (Ibid, letter from Angus Cameron to O'Connor, June 2, 1969) But The New Yorker magazine viewed O'Connor's work as more than a remembrance of an earlier age: "... because he still feels those years, and is well-able to express his feeling, his reminiscences are also rich, and rich in more than mere nostalgia." (The New Yorker, May 17, 1969, p. 152.)

Senator Barry Goldwater, himself a native Arizonian, wrote to Cameron that Horse and Buggy West was "a different approach than Jack has used before, and, frankly, I think he is more successful in this type of presentation than he has been in the past, even though his other books are excellent." (Letter from Barry Goldwater to Angus Cameron, January 3, 1969. O'Connor Papers, Box 11, scrapbook.)

Although O'Connor retired from Outdoor Life in 1972, he continued to remain active, to hunt, and to write. He joined Peterson's Hunting Magazine as executive editor and wrote additional articles for other magazines. His last major sheep hunt occurred in the mid-1970s when he was in his mid-70s. O'Connor died of a heart attack on January 20, 1978, aboard the S.S. Mariposa as it was returning to San Francisco from a three-week cruise to Hawaii.