Joseph Wayne

Overholser grew up on two different farms in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. He graduated from Pleasant Hill High School in 1924. He first attended Albany College, then the Oregon Normal School. He taught school in Tillamook and Bend. Overholser attended summer school from 1927-1934, taking botany classes and studying under writing professor W. F. G. Thacher (who also mentored Ernest Haycox, whom Overholser cited as an influence) at the University of Oregon, graduating in 1934 with a bachelor of science degree. He married Evaleth Miller in 1934, and the couple traveled to Missoula, Montana in 1935 where Wayne studied with E. Douglas Branch and Robert Penn Warren. He sold his first story to Popular Western, a pulp magazine, in 1936. Overholser was referenced in Stephen King's novel Wolves of the Calla, part of King's Dark Tower, in which he was both mentioned explicitly, and is the namesake of a character in the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis.