Author. Born Frederick Schiller Faust, he is best remembered for his thoughtful and literary Westerns under the pen name Max Brand. His other pseudonyms include George Owen Baxter, George Evans, David Manning, John Frederick, Peter Morland, George Challis and Frederick Frost. He grew up in central California working as a cowhand on one of the many ranches of the San Joaquin Valley. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he began to write for student publications, poetry magazines and newspapers. Failing to graduate, he joined the Canadian Army in 1915, but deserted the next year and moved to New York City. During the 1910s, he sold stories to the pulp magazines of Frank Munsey, including All-Story Weekly and Argosy Magazine. When the United States entered 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, he 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 has been speculated that these classical influences accounted in some part for his success as a popular writer. Many of his stories 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. In 1934 he began to write for upscale, slick magazines, often writing from a villa in Italy. In 1938, due to political events in Europe, he returned with his family to the United States and settled in Hollywood where he worked as a screenwriter for a number of film studios. He made a fortune from MGM's Dr. Kildare adaptions. He became one of the highest paid writers of his day. Ironically, he 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, he insisted on doing his part, and despite being well into middle age and having a heart condition, managed to become a front line war correspondent. Soldiers with whom he served reportedly enjoyed having this popular author among them. While traveling with American soldiers fighting in Italy, he was was killed on May 12, 1944 by shrapnel. He was personally commended for bravery by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During his career he wrote more than 500 novels for magazines and almost as many short stories. New books based on magazine serials or previously unpublished works authored by him continue to appear, so that he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years.