But anyone who transformed himself into a new-age wise man for the greening of America while taking the name of "Forrest" Carter couldn't have been entirely humorless. Mr. Carter, after all, took his new name from Nathan Bedford Forrest, the tobacco-chewing ex-mule skinner, slave trader and Civil War general who founded the original Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee in 1866.

Can this be the same man who wrote "The Education of Little Tree" with its saccharine environmentalism and patronizing descriptions of imaginary Cherokee grandparents? ("They gave themselves . . . to nature, not trying to subdue it, or pervert it, but to live with it. And so they loved the thought, and loving it grew to be it, so that they could not think as the white man.")

One explanation is suggested by the Calhoun County High School yearbook for 1943. The senior class prophet predicted he would return to Calhoun County as a "famous movie star." When he died in Abilene, Tex., of heart failure at the age of 53, he was on his way to California with a screenplay for his second Josey Wales book. Handsome, energetic, ambitious, always the actor, his classmates had known that Asa Carter would do whatever he had to to escape the sleepy little Alabama town of Oxford.

In his lifetime, Forrest Carter was able to move from Klan rabble-rouser to speech writer for George Wallace's white backlash to successful author and screenwriter by finding a voice in harmony with a changing America.

In Asa Carter's first book, the rebel outlaw Josey Wales seeks common ground with the Commanche chief, Ten Bears, in a soliloquy that Clint Eastwood repeats in his film. "What ye and me cares about has been butchered . . . raped," Wales tells Ten Bears. "It's been done by them lyin', double-tongued snakes that run guv-mints. Guv-mints lie . . . promise . . . back-stab . . . eat in youre lodge and rape youre women and kill when ye sleep on their promises."

Even the gentle Little Tree, Mr. Carter's newly popular hero, learned to despise all representatives of organized society -- teachers, politicians, religious leaders -- as "powerful monsters who had no regard for how folks had to live and get by."

From Tom Mix to Gary Cooper, the task of the traditional western hero was to replace the savage world of the desperado with the civilized community governed by the rule of law. Americans might feel a loss at the end of the frontier, but the word "outlaw" was seldom a compliment.