Monday, June 3, 2013

Faust’s Secret War

Kevin Coolidge

Frederick Schiller Faust was born on May 29, 1892 in Seattle, Washington. His parents were poor, and life was tough. He would escape his hardscrabble life through his fertile imagination and his love of medieval literature. His parents died when he was still young.

When orphaned, he was sent to live with a distant relative, Thomas Downey, a high school principal. Downey introduced him to mythology. Greek and Latin literature would continue to feed his love of storytelling throughout his life.

He went on to attend the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote for student publications, poetry magazines and newspapers. He showed promise as a writer, and had a natural inclination towards poetry. He was not, however, a good student. He was too restless, a maverick, and never graduated.

When the United States entered World War I, Faust tried to enlist, but was rejected even for the Ambulance Corps, because of an enlarged heart. He then turned his focus to becoming a major poet. He worked manual labor until Mark Twain’s sister read a letter he wrote to The New York Times. She was so impressed that she arranged for him to meet the editor of Munsey Publications.

He began writing extensively for pulp magazines. By the time he sold his third story, he had begun to write under a pen name. This was more than the desire to be anonymous. America was at war with Germany, and using a German name would destroy his career. What name is more German than Faust?

Once he felt his new vocation as a magazine writer was secure, he married his college sweetheart, Dorothy Schillig. He began to write for more upscale magazines, and many of his stories inspired films. His character Dr. Kildare was adapted to radio, movies, and even comic books.

He made a small fortune from these adaptations. He also began working as a screenwriter for Hollywood studios. At one point, he was making $3,000 a week from Warner Brothers, at a time when most people didn’t even make that in a year. Faust became one of the highest paid writers of his time.

Faust disparaged his commercial success. He only used his real name for his poetry. He would spend each morning devoted to the work that he regarded as his literary calling. He considered three lines crafted as a successful day. In the afternoon, he might write crank out thirty pages of a story.

Many of Faust’s characters died a heroic death in battle. Perhaps, it was this romantic notion that made Faust insist on doing his part when the Untied States entered World War II. He had missed the Great War, and he wasn’t going to miss another.

He was well into middle age, and had a chronic heart condition, so he had to use all his connections to become a front line war correspondent on the Italian front. There he lived among men who had grown up reading his stories of heroes and great deeds, and there he died. In 1944, he was mortally wounded by shrapnel in what some historians have called the “bloodiest conflict of the entire war.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally commended him for bravery.

Often condemned by those seeking realistic detail in fiction, this didn’t stop Faust from becoming one of the world’s most popular and prolific storytellers. His love of mythology and storytelling drove him to write more than 500 novels, and almost as many short stories. His literary output is estimated at between 25 and 30 million words. He was a poet, an author of romance, fairy tales, legends, dreams and dramas, and wrote over 300 Western novels and stories.

Faust wrote under many pseudonyms—including George Owen Baxter, David Manning, Evan Evans, George Evans, John Frederick, George Challis, Peter Morland, and Frederick Frost, but you probably know him as Max Brand, the Shakespeare of the Western range…

Make your Brand? Or Does Grey matter? Email me at from_my_shelf@yahoo.com and let me know. Miss a past column? No need to worry none. You can catch yourself up at http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com. At the heart of every tale, you’ll find a hero, “Hobo Finds A Home” is the journey of a little, furry one…










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