Over the Northern Border

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Fredrick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) was born in Seattle, Washington. He wrote over 500 average-length books (300 of them Westerns) under nineteen different pseudonyms, but Max Brand—“the Jewish cowboy,” as he once dubbed it—has become the most familiar and is now his trademark. Faust was convinced very early that to die in battle was the most heroic of deaths, and so, when the Great War began, he tried to get overseas. All of his efforts came to nothing, and in 1917, working at manual labor in New York City, he wrote a letter that was carried in The New York Times protesting this social injustice. Mark Twain’s sister came to his rescue by arranging for Faust to meet Robert H. Davis, an editor at The Frank A. Munsey Company.

Faust wanted to write—poetry. What happened instead was that Davis provided Faust with a brief plot idea, told him to go down the hall to a room where there was a typewriter, only to have Faust return some six hours later with a story suitable for publication. That was “Convalescence,” a short story that appeared in All-Story Weekly (3/31/17) and that launched Faust’s career as an author of fiction.Zane Grey had recently abandoned the Mun-sey publications, All-Story Weekly and The Argosy, as a market for his Western serials, selling them instead to the slick-paper Country Gentleman. The more fiction Faust wrote for Davis, the more convinced this editor became that Faust could equal Zane Grey in writing a Western story.

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