"McCabe & Mrs. Miller" is based on Edmund Naughton's 1959 novel "McCabe". David Foster, one of the film's producers, had purchased the film rights to the novel in 1968; he'd learned of the novel while negotiating with Ellen Wright (the widow of novelist Richard Wright) over the rights to "The Mandarins", a novel by Simone de Beauvoir. Wright was acting as the agent for Naughton, who was then living in Paris and working for the "International Herald Tribune". With his partner, Mitchell Broward, Foster then negotiated a deal with the Fox studio for two films. By October, 1968, Foster had commissioned a screenplay from Ben Maddow, a well-known poet and screenwriter.