Customer Reviews

Bigger than Life: The Creator of Doc Savage

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I stumbled across this book in a bookstore and bought it because of my fond memories of the Doc Savage series which I read in the seventies (I wish someone would re-issue them).

I had high hopes for learning quite a bit more about the author of so many of those books, but I ended up somewhat diappointed. Either Dent wasn't nearly as interesting as I anticpated or there's just of lot of information missing here. It may be no fault of the author's, it may well be that there just wasn't that much to write about. Dent did lead what appears to be an interesting life, he apparently was something of an adventurer, but this book is short of details when it comes to those adventures.

And there is absolutely no introspection into what drove this guy, beyond a desire to earn a living. Next to Robert E. Howard, another author who is was somewhat contemporaneous with Dent, Dent is a bore.

It's also kind of a misnomer to label him the creator of Doc Savage. The idea was actually that of the publisher, although he certainly gets credit for bringing that idea to life.

I wish I could recommend this, but as biographies go, its just not very compelling reading.