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THE WORLD'S MOST CELEBRATED WESTERN WRITER! |
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A Brief Biography of Frederick Faust
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Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work including three TV series, radio programs, and a Broadway musical. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in as many different ways.
Born in Seattle in 1892 and orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At the University of California, Berkeley, he became a student rebel and a one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. He was denied his degree because of unconventional conduct. He then embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful popular-prose writer. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, Italy, and finally Los Angeles.
For many years he lived in a villa in Florence with his wife and their three children. Every morning he laboriously wrote poetry with a quill pen on special, parchment-like paper. If he produced three lines that satisfied him he considered it a good morning's work. Every afternoon and sometimes into the evening he pounded out prose fiction on an old Underwood upright typewriter. Twenty pages was his usual stint but when pressed he could do forty and even fifty. He thought of himself as a poet but the prose paid the bills. He seldom revised. Usually the words went straight into print, sometimes at the rate of two million a year.
Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials, unpublished manuscripts, or restored versions continue to appear so that, dead and alive, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. In the United States alone, nine publishers now issue his work. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one format or other somewhere in the world. Yet, only recently have the full dimensions of this extraordinarily versatile and prolific writer come to be recognized, and his stature as a protean literary figure acknowledged. His popularity continues to grow throughout the world.
 Doctor Kildare The man on the right is the real Dr. Kildare! The fictional Dr. Kildare was based on Frederick Faust's best friend Dr. George "Dixie" Fish, shown here with Faust in Venice in 1935. |
 Destry Rides Again Destry was created by Faust as a reluctant western hero, and was captured best in the 1939 Hollywood classic Destry Rides Again starring James Stewart as Destry and Marlene Dietrich as Frenchie. |
Faust's "Dr. Kildare" stories became films starring Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore, and a TV series starring Richard Chamberlain and Raymond Massey. |
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Technical Specialties
