Despite this success, Gipson was troubled by fears of inadequacy. The Book-of-the-Month Club guaranteed Gipson $25, 000, then a princely sum. The Charlie Sanders novel was accepted by Harper in June and published as Hound-Dog Man (1949). The Gipsons left for Colorado in February 1948, but by summer, unhappy with life in Durango, they returned to Texas. Meanwhile, Day helped Gipson get a job on the Rocky Mountain Empire magazine. The manuscript went to Houghton, where it stayed nine months until the publisher suggested revisions, which Gipson refused. Gipson then returned to an earlier novel about Charlie Sanders, a hill country character with whom he had hunted as a boy. Fabulous Empire: Colonel Zack Miller's Story was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1946. Though he had little confidence in the completed book, Miller was delighted.

Gipson collected one thousand pages of notes for a biography. ' That November, Donald Day, editor of the Southwest Review, arranged a meeting between Gipson and Colonel Zack Miller, former proprietor of the 101 Wild West Show in Ponca City, Oklahoma. In 1943, Gipson sold a story to Collier's for $500, and in 1944 Reader's Digest reprinted 'My Kind of Man. Early in 1941, Joe Small, a college friend who had become a literary agent, helped Gipson sell his Western stories to magazines, and by August 1942 he had earned enough to build a small dwelling on the family farm. This experience became the basis for his 1950 novel, The Home Place. In June 1940, after his honeymoon in Mexico, Gipson was fired from his newspaper job and took his wife to live at the family homestead near Mason. The chain soon made him a roving reporter, publishing his articles in three papers. Gipson left college in 1937 to be a reporter for Hart-Hankes Newspapers at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Frank Dobie and was elected president of the journalism society. In 1936, he won a writing contest judged by author J. His story 'Hard-Pressed Sam' was published by the Southwest Review, and his columns began to appear in the university's Daily Texan. That fall, Gipson's younger brother urged Fred to come with him to the University of Texas.

In 1931, the Great Depression forced Gipson and his father to seek work as day laborers. At twenty, he had his own team on a county road-building gang. Daunted, Gipson turned to breaking and driving mules. Yearning to be a cowboy, he signed on in late 1927 for a nightmarish ten-day goat drive through almost continuous rain. After completing a bookkeeping course in San Antonio, Gipson returned to Mason to work for a local grocer.

Old yeller by fred gibson