Who wrote The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, winner of the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

Robert Lewis Taylor wrote The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, winner of the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Published in 1958, the novel is presented as the memoir of fourteen-year-old Jaimie McPheeters. He travels west from St. Louis toward California during the 1849 Gold Rush, encountering prospectors, travelers, criminals, and other figures of the expanding frontier.

Taylor uses a humorous, historical-adventure style and gives the narrative the voice of a young observer. The book’s fictional memoir format can make it seem like a genuine historical document, but Jaimie is an invented character.

The novel is sometimes confused with other Pulitzer-winning westerns, including The Way West and Lonesome Dove. Its distinctive setting is the Gold Rush era, and its first-person narrator is a teenager rather than an adult pioneer or historian.