Max Brand
May 29, 1892 — May 12, 1944
Max Brand was the most famous pen name of Frederick Schiller Faust, an American author who wrote more than 500 novels and stories under approximately 21 different pen names, becoming the best-selling Western fiction writer of his era and also creating the beloved Dr. James Kildare medical drama character.
A Prolific Life of Writing
Born on May 29, 1892 in Seattle, Washington, Frederick Schiller Faust had an impoverished and difficult childhood in California's Central Valley after his parents died when he was a teenager. He attended the University of California, Berkeley but left before graduating and began writing fiction professionally. His output was so enormous that it is difficult to fully quantify — estimates suggest he wrote approximately 30 million words across his career, and his bibliography includes works in Western fiction, historical romance, adventure stories, crime fiction, and medical drama. His most famous pen name was Max Brand, under which he wrote hundreds of Western novels and stories, but he also wrote as George Owen Baxter, Evan Evans, David Manning, and many other names. The productivity that made him rich also reflected an unusual creative energy: he was reportedly capable of writing 10,000 words in a single day.
Destry Rides Again and Dr. Kildare
Among his Western novels, Destry Rides Again (1930) was the most famous, adapted into a celebrated 1939 film starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich that remains one of the classic Western comedies. But his other great creation was entirely outside the Western genre: Dr. James Kildare, a young idealistic hospital intern whose adventures Faust wrote in a series of stories beginning in the 1930s. The Dr. Kildare stories spawned a successful film series, and decades after Faust's death, the character was adapted into the massively popular television series Dr. Kildare (1961–66) starring Richard Chamberlain — one of the first major medical dramas on American television, and the direct ancestor of shows like ER and Grey's Anatomy.
Did You Know?
Max Brand/Frederick Faust, despite becoming wealthy from his writing, spent much of his life yearning to write what he considered "serious" literature — poetry, particularly, which he regarded as his true calling. He wrote poetry throughout his life and considered his enormously successful fiction to be largely commercial work that funded his real ambitions. He is said to have been somewhat embarrassed by how famous "Max Brand" became, seeing it as a commercial persona that overshadowed the poet he wanted to be. The irony is that his popular fiction, not his poetry, has proven to be his lasting contribution.
Death in Italy
Max Brand died on May 12, 1944 near Anzio, Italy, where he was working as a war correspondent for Harper's Magazine during World War II. He was 51. He was wounded in a German artillery attack and died of his wounds, still writing almost to the end of his life. He was buried at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery. His death at the height of his creative powers — still producing fiction at a remarkable rate and trying, at last, to witness the great historical events of his time directly — gives his story an elegiac quality that his pulp fiction career perhaps obscures. He remains the most prolific Western fiction writer in American literary history.