Max Brand

Frederick Faust, aka Max Brand

Frederick Schiller Faust (May 29, 1892 – May 12, 1944) was an American author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary Westerns. Faust wrote mostly under pen names, but today is primarily known by only one, Max Brand. His other pen names include George Owen Baxter, George Evans, David Manning, John Frederick, Peter Morland, George Challis, and Frederick Frost.

Faust was born in Seattle to Gilbert Leander Faust and Elizabeth (Uriel) Faust, who both died soon afterward. He grew up in central California, and later worked as a cowhand on one of the many ranches of the San Joaquin Valley. Faust attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he began to write prolifically for student publications, poetry magazines, and, occasionally, newspapers. He did not attain a degree, as he was deemed a troublemaker, whereupon he began to travel extensively. He joined the Canadian Army in 1915, but deserted the next year and went to New York City.

During the 1910s, Faust started to sell stories to the pulp magazines of Frank Munsey, including All-Story Weekly and Argosy Magazine. When the United States joined World War I in 1917, Faust tried to enlist but was rejected. He married Dorothy Schillig in 1917, and the couple had three children.

In the 1920s, Faust wrote extensively for pulp magazines, especially Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, a weekly for which he would write over a million words a year under various pen names, often seeing two serials and a short novel published in a single issue. In 1921, he suffered a severe heart attack, and for the rest of his life suffered from chronic heart disease.

His love for mythology was a constant source of inspiration for his fiction, and it might be that his classical influences, as well as his literary inclinations, partially accounted for his success in genre fiction. The classical influences are certainly evident in his stories, many of which would later inspire films. He created the Western character Destry, featured in several cinematic versions of Destry Rides Again, and his character Dr. Kildare was adapted to motion pictures, radio, television and comic books.

Beginning in 1934, Faust published fiction in upscale slick magazines that paid better than pulp magazines. In 1938, due to political events in Europe, Faust returned with his family to the United States, settling in Hollywood, and working as a screenwriter for a number of film studios. At one point, Warner Brothers was paying him $3,000 a week (which would be a year’s salary for an average worker at the time), and he made a fortune from MGM’s Dr. Kildare adaptions. (He was one of the highest paid writers of that time). Ironically, Faust disparaged his commercial success and used his real name only for the poetry that he regarded as his literary calling.

When World War II began, Faust insisted on doing his part, and despite being well into middle age and having a heart condition, he managed to become a front line war correspondent. Faust was quite famous, and the soldiers enjoyed having this popular author among them. While traveling with American soldiers fighting in Italy in 1944, Faust was mortally wounded by shrapnel. He was personally commended for bravery by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Faust rivalled Edgar Wallace and Isaac Asimov as one of the most prolific authors of all time. He wrote more than 500 novels for magazines and almost as many shorter stories. His total literary output is estimated to have been between 25,000,000 and 30,000,000 words. Most of his books and stories were produced at a breakneck pace, which sometimes amounted to 12,000 words in one weekend. New books based on magazine serials or previously unpublished works authored by him continue to appear, so that Faust has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Moreover, some work by him is reprinted every week each year, in one format or another, somewhere in the world.

External links

• Max Brand official website
• Guide to the Frederick Schiller Faust Papers at The Bancroft Library
• Works by Max Brand at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Max Brand in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Max Brand public domain audiobooks from LibriVox

Persondata
Name	Brand, Max
Alternative names	Faust, Frederick Schiller (birth name); Baxter, George Owen (pseudonym); Challis, George (pseudonym); Evans, George (pseudonym); Frederick, John (pseudonym); Frost, Frederick (pseudonym); Manning, David (pseudonym); Morland, Peter (pseudonym)
Short description	Novelist, short story writer
Date of birth	May 29, 1892
Place of birth	Seattle, Washington, United States
Date of death	May 12, 1944
Place of death	Italy