Dale Van Every

Dale Van Every combined journalism, fiction, screenwriting, production, and history whose career moved between newspapers, Hollywood, and books about the American frontier. The Captive Witch is one of his historical novels, set within the colonial world that also informed works such as A Company of Heroes. After studying at Stanford and serving overseas during the First World War, Van Every worked for United Press before entering motion pictures. His screen credits included stories, adaptations, and production work, and he shared an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of Captains Courageous with Marc Connelly and John Lee Mahin. He later turned sustained attention to frontier history in a four-volume sequence beginning with Forth to the Wilderness and continuing westward across successive periods of settlement. Van Every also co-wrote an early biography of Charles Lindbergh. The Captive Witch belongs to the fiction side of a career consistently interested in how personal conflict unfolds within larger episodes of American expansion and historical change.