O'Connor is probably one of the few gunwriters that wrote enough mainstream stuff to have made a living at it. Some of the stuff he did like short storeis for The Saturday EVening Post and Esquire was pretty mainstream.
Seems most of the other gun writers of his generation had done other things whether it be the military, guiding, etc and more fell into writing later in life than actually setting out to be a writer.
O'Connor did not make a living writing more mainstream stuff. In fact, he confesses in The Last Book that he did not have real "feel" for the mainstream short-story genre, as other stories he submitted were rejected. But it was worth a try! Those magazines paid a LOT back in those days.
In fact Dorothy Johnson, the Montana fiction author who among other things wrote the story "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," was able to buy a house in Missoula, Montana for cash with the pay from four short stories in the The Saturday Evening Post. She was paid $3000 for each story, a LOT of money at the time.
But back then print writing paid better than many other kinds of writing--except, perhaps, for screen writing, the reason many fiction writers (including William Faulkner) wrote screenplays for Hollywood movies.
O'Connor eventually ended up as a gun and hunting writer because it paid more consistently than short stories or novels. Quite a few gun writers have written for mainstream markets, including me. Among others I did an article for National Geographic in the 1990s, when writing for a wide variety of magazines.
But you're right about many gun writers starting out in other careers--and not just of O'Connor's generation. That's still the primary path today.
