Max Brand

Frederick Schiller Faust worked at a rate of ten to twenty thousand words a day and published under at least seventeen different names, of which Max Brand is the one that stuck. The Untamed ran as a serial in All-Story Weekly from December 1918 into January 1919 and was his first Western; Tom Mix played its drifting hero Whistling Dan Barry in the 1920 film. Speedy's Mare comes from a run of nine stories about Speedy, a young man who outmanoeuvres far harder men without carrying a gun, printed in Street and Smith's Western Story Magazine, a title Faust supplied so heavily that he occasionally filled an entire issue himself. Beyond the Outposts and Mountain Storms, the latter also known as Wild Freedom, belong to the same magazine years. He hoped to be remembered for his poetry, and is instead remembered for the Westerns and for Dr James Kildare, the young intern he invented, who went on into films, radio, television and comics. Faust died on 12 May 1944, aged 51, hit by shell fragments while reporting for Harper's alongside American infantry in Italy.