Customer Reviews

Max Brand the Big "Westerner"

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He was a poet primarily, part of a brilliant pre-war class at UC Berkeley,and his real name was Frederick Faust. As Faust he made a small name for himself in the middle of a tumultuous period for American poetry, but it wasn't until a dime-novel pulp publisher literally locked him in an office for four hours, with a precis for a plot no more than a few sentences long, that he became a fiction writer--for he stepped out of that room with a novel of 74,000 words and a contract to write twenty more. And a new name, Max Brand, one of dozens of pseudonyms he came up with to disguise his own production. People thought there were a hundred Western writers, but really, Faust was nearly all of them. The aging Zane Grey was no competition, for after a flow start "Max Brand" wound up writing what Robert Easton claims was 30,000,000 million words--so many manuscripts that publishers kept bringing out new ones for 30 years after his death!

Faust died at D-Day, of all places, a true American war hero, and he even gave up his claim to medical treatment, urging the docs to treat other soldiers with wounds worse than his own.

He created Dr. Kildare, once a famous icon of the movies and TV, now not so widely known, but wait till the DVD revolution catches up with Kildare (and his gruff old boss with the kindly heart, Dr. Gillespie). I've heard that the MGM series will be released within the next 18 months, the 60s TV show with Richard Chamberlain too! I can't wait because those shows were always worth staying up late for. And such unusual guest stars, everyone from Basil Rathbone to Fred Astaire, Angie Dickinson to Valli.

Easton was a contemporary of Brand and knows his story inside out. He does his best to strip the obfuscations from his Byronic hero's life, and to show how, after all, he might have been a trying husband to loyal, prim Dorothy, with his demands for continual intercourse and claiming the right to have sex with other women, while she was forced to balance the budget and keep a nice home for him. The book came out in 1970, and has a few pruderies typical of the period, but not many. It was a great time for University of Oklahome Press, they just couldn't put out a bad book, and several of the books advertised on the back jacket as "Also of Interest" remain of interest today--Louis Mertins' invaluable record of Robert Frost's "table talk" (really his walking talk); Bruce Kellner's early biography of Carl Van Vechten, still the best account of that puzzling man; and Born In a Bookshop, the memoirs of Vincent Starrett, okay, this last one all charm and no substance. But still a fine roll call, no?