Old Yeller

Old Yeller is a 1956 children's novel by Fred Gipson, illustrated by Carl Burger, which received a Newbery Honor in 1957. It is set on the Texas frontier and narrated by Travis Coates, a fourteen-year-old left responsible for the family farm while his father is away.

A yellow stray comes to the farm and takes meat the family cannot spare, and Travis resents him at first. The dog turns out to be fearless and useful, protecting the family from a bear and from rabid animals and helping with the stock, and the novel follows a season of work that involves illness, a fever among the animals and the question of what a man does when there is nobody else to do it.

Gipson wrote from his own experience of a Texas boyhood, and the book is a story about a child taking on adult responsibility and about the cost of the decisions that come with it. Walt Disney released a film adaptation in 1957, and the novel is short, with one season of farm work giving it its shape.