Jim Kjelgaard: "A Master Storyteller"

A Little About… Forest Patrol   JIM KJELGAARD turned 31 the year his first novel, Forest Patrol , illustrated by Tony Palazzo, was published by Holiday House (1941). He had married Edna – Eddy – Dresden two years earlier and moved from Pennsylvania to Milwaukee where the couple welcomed their first and only child, Karen. Kjelgaard had been working as a full-time writer since 1938. His first significant sale had been a short non-fiction piece, “Hair Over the Sights,” to Fur-Fish-Game in Jan. 1934 and in 1938 his adventure story, “River Man” (Nov. 5), made the pages of one of the most celebrated pulps of the era: Argosy .      Over the next several years Kjelgaard regularly contributed to  Argosy . In 1939 and 1940 alone, at least 17 of Kjelgaard’s shorts were published in its pages. His 1940 story, “The Battle of Dabbit Run” (Mar. 9), was adapted into an episode of the anthology television series,  Studio 57 , which aired June 15, 1955, on the DuMont T...