The Ghost Wagon and Other Great Western Adventures

Max Brand

G.K. Hall, 1996 - Fiction - 450 pages

The Ghost Wagon and Other Great Western Adventures collects four additional short novels by Max Brand not previously published in book form. These novels represent some of the best of Brand's western writing. They illustrate the expansiveness of Brand's imagination and the fecundity with which he would vary his themes, examining the human condition from numerous disparate viewpoints. In Max Brand's stories no character is either a hero or a villain, and most are mixtures of both. That is certainly the case in "The Ghost Wagon, " first published in 1921. Both Lew Carney and Jack Doyle love Mary Hamilton-and she has plans of her own. "Rodeo Ranch" proved one of Brand's most popular short novels the year it first appeared in Western Story Magazine (1923). "Slip Liddel" (1938) is set during the Depression and centers on a poor man's revenge. It is reminiscent of Brand's own unhappy early years as a farm and ranch laborer. "A Matter of Honor" was published under the title "Jerico's Garrison Finish" in 1921. The story has much more to do with Jim Orchard's struggles to distinguish between honor and pride than with mere horse racing. Brand's fiction was frequently amputated by magazine editors seeking to fit it to the page, and his titles were often changed to appear more exciting or appealing. Jon Tuska has returned to the original manuscripts, restoring the full texts and original titles.

Contents

• Foreword: 7
• Rodeo Ranch: 119
• Slip Liddell: 215

About the author

Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, who was born in Seattle, Washington in 1882, 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 to campus publications. He was denied his degree because of his unconventional conduct. He then traveled, ending up in New York City where he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful popular-prose writer. Later, he traveled further, making his home in New York, then in Florence, Italy, and finally Los Angeles. He much preferred Italy, where he lived from 1926 to 1938, and where much of his writing was done. Faust, who wrote under more than a dozen pseudonyms, was a prolific writer, not only of westerns, but also of hundreds of other novels and books, including the popular Dr. Kildare series. Faust's first novel The Untamed (1918) was a success and introduced a semimythical character, Whistlin' Dan Barry, who travels the West following the wild geese, accompanied by a black wolf. His characters, who often have a mythic quality, are memorable, and his books are always entertaining. Faust was also a screenwriter for several Hollywood studios, including MGM, Warner Brothers, and Columbia. 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. Faust died in 1944, killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. Even after his death, new books based on magazine serials, unpublished manuscripts, or restored versions continue to appear so that he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Ghost Wagon and Other Great Western Adventures; G. K. Hall Western Series; G.K. Hall large print western series; Thorndike Western II
• Author: Max Brand
• Editor: Jon Tuska
• Edition: reprint, large print
• Publisher: G.K. Hall, 1996
• ISBN: 0783818629, 9780783818627
• Length: 450 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Westerns