Frederick Schiller Faust died in 1944, but a new Max Brand Western still appears on an average of once every four months, usually with the claim "First time in paperback." Evidently there is no slowing of the pace of new editions.

Faust began his life in humble circumstances and spent his early years as a manual laborer, but by the time he died he had become perhaps the most prolific fiction writer ever to live in the United States. Fittingly, this writer of violent, fast-paced Westerns died on the battlefield in World War II. Although he was born Frederick Faust, and although he eventually used at least seventeen pseudonyms, the world remembers him as Max Brand.

Faust was born on 29 May 1892 into a family of German-American-Irish origins. His family called him Schiller as a child. Gilbert Leander Faust, his father, the child of German immigrants, had grown up in...