Random Thoughts

American novelist and short story author Frederick Schiller Faust was better known to readers of his works as Max Brand. Faust, however, also used other pseudonyms because he wrote so much.

Brand specialized in writing western stories. One of his most popular works was “Destry Rides Again,” published in 1930. The novel spawned three movie versions (starring Tom Mix, Jimmy Stewart and Audie Murphy), a Broadway musical and a television series.

Brand not only wrote westerns, but he published books in other genres as well. Among his many works were several medical dramas. Perhaps the most enduring of all the characters Brand created was a young doctor named James Kildare.

That fictional physician became the basis of nine movies and two television series. One of the latter made a star of Richard Chamberlain, who won a Golden Globe award for his work in the series (which ran on network television from 1961 to 1966).

Brand made lots of money writing. During the Great Depression of the 1930s he often made over $100,000 a year (a fortune during that era). Later, he exceeded that amount as movie studios paid to adapt his works into films.

Apparently, Brand was a workaholic who could not slow down. I once read a newspaper article that said he would hire several stenographers at a time with each working on a separate novel. Brand would go around the room all day long talking to the stenographers, dictating chapters of several books at once!

Estimates are that Brand wrote somewhere between 25 and 30 million words in his career and published around 500 novels. Stories that first appeared as magazine serials or that were never published are being issued in book form all the time.

Brand went to Italy during World War II as a war correspondent. On May 12, 1944, he died when hit by shrapnel. He was only 51 years old. His premature death robbed his fans of an untold number of other books that he would surely have written had he lived longer.