Max Brand
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Frederick Schiller Faust (May 29, 1892 - May 12, 1944) was an American fiction author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary Westerns. Faust wrote mostly under pen names, and today he is primarily known by one, Max Brand. Others include George Owen Baxter, Martin Dexter, Evin Evans, David Manning, Peter Dawson, John Frederick, and Pete Morland.
Faust was born in Seattle and both his parents died soon after. He grew up in central California and later worked as a cowhand on one of the many ranches of the San Joaquin Valley. Faust attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he began to write frequently. He did not attain a degree, as he was deemed a troublemaker, and he began to travel extensively.
During the 1910s, Faust started to sell stories to the many emerging pulp magazines of the era. Faust attempted to enlist in the armed forces when the United States joined World War I in 1917, but was denied entry. In the 1920s, Faust wrote furiously in many genres, achieving success and fame, first in the pulps and later in the upscale "slick" magazines. Contrary to the publicity produced by the magazines he wrote for, Faust heartily disliked the real West and greatly resented it when forced by Argosy Magazine editor Bob Davis to travel to a ranch in 1919.
Faust became overworked and was diagnosed by a doctor with an undefined heart condition, but continued to travel and write a massive amount of material, working in many genres. He invented the Western character "Destry" (featured in several filmed versions of Destry Rides Again), and his character Dr. Kildare was adapted to radio, television and comic books.
In the 1930s, Faust joined the literary trek to Hollywood and wrote scripts; at one point Warner Brothers was paying him $3000 per week (at a time when that might be a year's salary for an average worker), and he made a fortune from MGM's use of Dr. Kildare. He was one of the highest earning writers of that time.
Faust felt contempt for his pulp work, never editing his first drafts, not even allowing the pulp magazines in which he was published into his home. Faust saved the use of his legal name for the classically themed poetry he considered his real vocation. Sadly for him, his poetry was generally a commercial failure and according to his biographer Robert Easton, perhaps an artistic failure as well. Charles Beaumont states that Faust knew this, and that his success in work he despised combined with failure at work he valued "broke his heart."
His love for mythology was, however, a constant source of inspiration for his fiction and his classical and literary inclinations are perhaps part of the reason for his success at genre fiction. The classical influences are particularly noticeable in his first novel The Untamed, which was also made into a motion picture starring Tom Mix in 1920.
By the mid-1930s, Faust was an alcoholic, and in 1938, went to Italy to die. Instead, unexpectedly, in Italy he flourished, taking up tennis, horseback riding, and purchasing an Isotta-Fraschini sports car. He lived in a villa in Florence with a large staff. His lavish lifestyle compelled him to keep writing, and money kept pouring in.
When World War II broke out, Faust insisted on doing his part, and despite being well into middle age managed to become a front line war correspondent. Faust was quite famous at this point and the soldiers enjoyed having this popular author among them. While traveling with American soldiers as they battled Germans in Italy, Faust was mortally wounded and died in a foxhole in 1944.
Faust managed a massive outpouring of fiction, rivaling Edgar Wallace and especially Isaac Asimov as one of the most prolific authors of all time. He may have published more than 500 novels and short stories. His total literary output is estimated to have been between 25,000,000 and 30,000,000 words. Most of the books and stories were turned out at breakneck rate, sometimes as quickly as 12,000 words in the course of a weekend.
[edit] References
- The Bloody Pulps, by Charles Beaumont, Playboy Magazine, September 1962. Reprinted in The Fantastic Pulps, edited by Peter Haining, Vintage Books, 1975, ISBN 0-394-72109-8.
