Colby College

Colby College was a turning point in Thomas Savage’s movement from ranch work toward writing. He enrolled as an English major in Waterville, Maine, and drafted his first novel there, bringing the landscape and labor he knew into a new literary direction.

Enrollment and a Change of Direction

Savage grew up amid ranching and spent several years working as a ranch hand. After an article he wrote about horse-breaking appeared in Coronet in 1937, he enrolled at Colby College to study English. The decision followed a growing restlessness and the dawning possibility of a life beyond ranching. On his twenty-first birthday, he was herding sheep in the Bitterroot Valley; his stepfather sent him to Colby. Savage also recalled that he had heard of a young woman who had attended high school in Missoula. They corresponded over the summer, and he returned to Montana; they married in 1939.

Study and the Beginnings of a Writing Career

At Colby, Savage began developing material rooted in the isolated ranching world he knew. His early story concerned the importance of a railroad to a community cut off from outside contact by a high pass and severe Montana winters. When he sent it to The Atlantic, editor Ed Weeks returned it, observing that the story lacked human beings and suggesting that Savage turn the material into a novel. Savage wrote the first draft of The Pass at Colby.

College Life and Literary Significance

The writing took precedence in a practical way: Dean Mariner allowed Savage to miss classes so long as he continued writing. This detail places Colby not merely as the setting of his studies but as the place where his experience of ranching began to take novelistic form. The Pass was published in 1944, establishing a connection between Savage’s education in English and a body of fiction deeply informed by the western life he had left behind.