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 is primarily known by one, Max Brand. Others include George Owen Baxter, Evan Evans, David Manning, John Frederick, Peter Morland, George Challis, and Frederick Frost.

Faust was born in Seattle to Gilbert Leander Faust and Elizabeth (Uriel) Faust, who both 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 prolifically for student publications, poetry magazines, and occasionally newspapers. He did not attain a degree, as he was deemed a troublemaker, and began to travel extensively. He joined the Canadian Army in 1915, but deserted the next year and went to New York City.

During the 1910s, Faust started to sell stories to the pulp magazines of Frank Munsey, including All-Story Weekly and Argosy Magazine. When the United States joined World War I in 1917, Faust tried to enlist but was turned down. He married Dorothy Schillig in 1917, and the couple had three children. In the 1920s, Faust wrote extensively for pulp magazines, especially Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, a weekly for which he would write over a million words a year in fiction published under various pen names, with often two serials and a short novel in a single issue. In 1921 he suffered a severe heart attack, and for the rest of his life suffered from chronic heart disease.

In 1925 Faust moved with his family to Europe, renting a villa in Florence, Italy, where he flourished, taking up tennis, horseback riding, and purchasing an Isotta-Fraschini sports car. His lavish lifestyle compelled him to keep writing at a furious pace, and money kept pouring in. Faust felt contempt for his pulp writing, leaving the editing of his stories to his wife, and kept the book editions of his fiction in an enclosed cabinet, never on display in his large library. 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 and critical 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 certainly noticeable in his first novel The Untamed, which was also made into a motion picture in 1920 starring Tom Mix. More than seventy of his stories would inspire films. He created the Western character Destry, featured in several filmed versions of Destry Rides Again, and his character Dr. Kildare was adapted to motion pictures, radio, television, and comic books.

Beginning in 1934 Faust began publishing fiction in upscale slick magazines that paid better than pulp magazines. In 1938, due to political events in Europe, Faust returned with his family to the United States, settling in Hollywood, working as a scriptwriter for a number of film studios. At one point Warner Brothers was paying him $3,000 a 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 the Dr. Kildare stories. He was one of the highest paid writers of that time.

When World War II broke out, Faust insisted on doing his part, and despite being well into middle age and a heart condition 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 by shrapnel and died in 1944. He was personally commended for bravery by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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 wrote more than 500 novels for magazines and almost as many stories of shorter length. His total literary output is estimated to have been between 25,000,000 and 30,000,000 words. Most of his books and stories were turned out at breakneck rate, sometimes as quickly as 12,000 words in the course of a weekend. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world.

[edit] References

The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1996) edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski provides a guide to Faust’s multitudinous fiction of all kinds and his life and times.

[edit] External links

• Max Brand official website
• Works by Max Brand at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Max Brand in libraries (WorldCat catalog)