Thomas C. (Thomas Clark) Hinkle

Born in La Clede, Illinois, in 1876, he moved to Kansas as a small child and later attended high school in Junction City. He went on to earn a medical degree from the University of Kansas in 1904, an unusual path for someone who would become best known as a novelist.

His fiction was aimed largely at younger readers, especially fans of animal stories and westerns. Many of his best-known books focus on horses or dogs, and his stories are often set against the landscapes of the American Midwest and West.

He died in Wamego, Kansas, in 1949. Although not widely famous today, he remains remembered by readers of classic juvenile fiction for fast-moving, animal-centered adventures such as Black Storm and Tomahawk, Fighting Horse of the Old West.