Source: "Six Decades of Doc Savage," in Doc Savage Omnibus #13, Bantam Books, 1990, pp. 419-30.

In the following essay, which is a slightly revised and expanded version of the afterword to the Doc Savage Omnibus #13, Murray discusses the origins and development of Doc Savage.

No one writer or editor conceived Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, whose adventures originally appeared in Doc Savage Magazine, which ran 181 issues from March 1933 to the Summer 1949 issue. Doc was the product of the greatest hero-making factory ever—he Street & Smith Publishing Company, which had been responsible for such still-famous icons as Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill, and Frank Merriwell during its dime-novel days and, after they switched over to publishing pulp magazines, new heroes like The Shadow, The Avenger, Bill Barnes, and many others.

Doc Savage came into being by accident. The accident was the mania caused by a popular radio show The Detective...