Katharine Newlin Burt was an American author and film screenwriter. She was a prolific author of Westerns and other novels, with a publishing career spanning more than six decades. At least seven of Burt's published novels were converted to cinema, and she wrote the original screenplays for two additional films. Thomas Shipley Newlin and Julia Maria (Onderdonk) Newlin gave birth to Katharine Newlin on September 6, 1882, in Fishkill Landing, New York. Newlin began writing short stories in kindergarten in Munich. In 1912, Newlin married novelist Maxwell Struthers Burt, and she adopted his surname. The couple had one son, Nathaniel Burt (who went on to become a writer), and one daughter, Julia. Norris Wilson Yates observes that Burt authored both formula and non-formula Westerns, and claims that she "excels in evoking Western landscape as a force in the lives and feelings of her characters." According to Victoria Lamont, Burt's The Branding Iron engages in a "radical, though still deeply problematic, feminism," which should modify our perspective on "the importance of western mythology in women's literary history." The Branding Iron, along with two other women's Westerns, "participated in a shift in Anglo-American feminist discourse as American feminism decoupled from the abolition movement and became racially divided."
