 In 1960, Matheson published "The Beardless Warriors", a non-fantastic, autobiographical novel about teenage American soldiers in World War II.It was filmed in 1967 as "The Young Warriors" though most of Matheson's plot was jettisoned.During the 1950s he published a handful of Western stories (later collected in "By the Gun"); and during the 1990s he published Western novels such as "Journal of the Gun Years", "The Gunfight", "The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickok", and "Shadow on the Sun".