Luke Short, whose real name was Frederick Glidden, had a writing career that spanned almost forty years. He was enormously popular and prolific, the writer of fifty-one Western novels. During the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression, Glidden earned a good living with his writing. Although by the end of his career he had been eclipsed by writers such as Louis L'Amour (pen name of Louis Dearborn LaMoore), he had helped to define Western fiction, if for no other reason, by the sheer volume of his work. At the time of his death in 1975 more than thirty-five million copies of his novels had been sold. Contemporary Western novelists such as Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy, though they may not acknowledge it, owe a debt to Glidden's vision of what a Western should be.

Frederick Dilley Glidden was born on 19 November 1908 in Kewanee, Illinois, the second son of...