Thursday, May 29, 2008

Happy Birthday, Max Brand!

"It's the birthday of the novelist who wrote under the name Max Brand, Frederick Faust, (books by this author) born in Seattle, Washington (1892). He was the most prolific fiction writer in American history. He published more than 200 novels in his lifetime, and for decades after his death, his unpublished novels continued to appear in paperback. He wrote thrillers, love stories, and melodramas, but he specialized in the Western, even though he knew almost nothing about frontier life. He's best known for his novel Destry Rides Again (1930).

During the Great Depression, he was one of the best-paid pulp fiction writers in America, earning five cents a word. He managed to make about $100,000 a year at that rate, finishing a full-length novel every week."

2 comments:

Doc Quatermass said...

Happy Birthday in the great writers den in the sky.

Frederick Schiller Faust (May 29, 1892 - May 12, 1944)

http://www.maxbrandonline.com/

Doc Quatermass said...

> he certainly has outlasted his
> critics that said he was too
> "mythic." Dumb bastards.

Isn't that the case with a majority of critics - dumb bastards. Look how maligned Mickey Spillane was (even among fellow writers) until Max Allan Collins started championing his writing. People confuse having an opinion with having an informed opinion.

As Tip O'Neil once said, "It takes a lot of work to build a barn. Any jackass can come and kick it down."

*****

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti - intellectualism has been a constant thread winding it’s way through our political and cultural life, nutured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. ~ Isaac Asimov, My Turn, Newsweek 21-Jan-1980