Max Brand, Western Giant

Book excerpt: Called the King of the Pulps, Frederick Schiller Faust, aka Max Brand, wrote nearly 400 Westerns from The Untamed to Destry Rides Again--a total of more than 220 books in this genre. Yet Max Brand also created Dr. Kildare (of books, films, and television) and wrote under twenty-one pseudonyms, in another dozen genres. This book removes the mask, with deeply personal memoirs from family, friends and fellow writers, taking us through his orphaned boyhood on the brutal ranches of California, his frustrating decades in Italy, as both a classical poet and a fast-action pulpist, to his heroic death as a war correspondent on the World War II battlefields. Faust's life story is augmented by a complete bibliography of his work--over a thousand books, stories, and films--plus the first listing of works about Faust.