Welcome to the “My Place” page
 My name is Scott
I run the Rope and Wire website.
My original idea for this page was to give those living in the country the opportunity to tell others about the things that made their farm or ranch so special.
Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that either no one likes to brag or no one lives on a farm or a ranch. Whatever the case, no one submitted an article so I felt it was high time to try something different.
So for now this will be literally “My Place.” I’ll use this page to post a western blog or short articles. They will either be mine, or possibly one from a contributing R&W community member.
The theme will remain Western but the content will change weekly, or there about.
If you click on any of the links to past blog's, you can return to this page by clicking on the My Place button across from my picture.
I hope you enjoy it but if not, might I suggest you “stroll the grounds.” Read a story or watch a movie.
Thanks for visiting.
Scott
Frederick Schiller Faust
During the course of some research I was doing on Frederick Faust the other day, I discovered an amazing thing. I hadn’t realized this until now, but the man was a literary dynamo. I can’t believe the amount of writing this one man generated. He actually generated enough for twenty. Most people who read Western novels know him by the pseudo name of Max Brand. He had nineteen others.
First, as usual with me, here's some history on the subject.
Faust was born in Seattle Washington in 1892. He lost his parents at the young age of 13 and as an orphan, he was passed between distant relatives for a time. As a consequence to all the shuffling he ended up attending nineteen different public schools, becoming involved in a series of fist fights at most of them. Eventually, as he put it, he “found his place”, withdrawing into a world of books and daydreams. During the course of his youth he ended up in the San Joaquin valley of California where he supported himself by among other things, working as a hired hand on a succession of the many farms ranches in the area. He attended U.C. Berkley but never graduated due to what the university called “unconventional Conduct” I.E. he was too rowdy. He soon ended up in New York City where he became recognized as a serious poet and successful popular-prose writer.
At some point, he made his way to Florence, Italy where he lived in a villa for a number of years (with his wife and three children), but eventually, he migrated back to Los Angeles, California.
In 1917, during WWI, he tried to enlist into the military but was turned down.
In the 1940’s, after the United States entered WWII, Frederick Faust volunteered again and this time he was accepted into the military where he served in the infantry as a war correspondent in Italy for “Harpers” Magazine.
On May 12th, 1944, Frederick Faust was involved in a night attack on a hilltop village being held by the German army. He was mortally wounded after being hit by a piece of shrapnel. He died at the age of 51.
He was said to be a heavy drinker and suffered from bouts of depression. No doubt, Frederick Faust had lived a hard life.
Faust always had an extraordinary mind. At times he was lost in a world of fantasy and daydreaming, but he always excelled at the ability to transfer his thoughts to paper with such speed and clarity he seldom needed to revise what he wrote. What he wrote went straight to print. He did this for close to forty years.
Just take a look at his many accomplishments. See if you can even begin to imagine the mind of this man and what must have been going on in his head each and every day.
Faust started each morning off by writing poetry with a quill pen on special parchment paper.
Every afternoon and into the evening he wrote prose fiction on an old Underwood typewriter. He averaged twenty pages a day, Every Day. If pressed he could do forty or even fifty pages. As I mentioned above, he seldom revised.
During the 1910’s he started to sell stories to the many emerging pulp fiction magazines of the era.
In the 1920’s he wrote extensively achieving success and fame.
During the 1930’s he wrote scripts for Hollywood.
Frederick Faust was one of the most prolific authors of all time rivaling Edgar Wallace and Isaac Asimov.
Eighty motion pictures, three TV series, radio programs and a musical have been based on his work.
He may have published over 500 books of novels and short stories. I say, “May have” because even though he died in 1944, he left behind a vast amount of material. Enough material to publish, on average, a new book every four months for seventy-five years.
And if that’s not enough... he also published four volumes of poetry.
The Western character “Destry” and the non-western character “Dr. Kildare” are credited to him.
Frederick Schiller Faust wrote under twenty different names other than his own.
Frank Austin, George Owen Baxter, Lee Bolt, Max Brand, Walter C. Butler, George Challis, Peter Dawson, Martin Dexter, Evin Evan, Evan Evans, John Frederick, Frederick Frost, Dennis Lawton, David Manning, Peter Henry Morland, High Owen, John Schoolcraft, Nicholas Silver, Henry Uriel, and Peter Ward.
Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres including Crime, Fantasy, Historical Romance, Espionage, Western, Science Fiction, Adventure, Animal Stories, Love, War, Big Business, Big Medicine, and Fashionable Society.
His total output is somewhere around 30 million words which is equivalent to about 530 average books.
Life’s circumstances set Frederick Foust onto a hard trail in life, but he found a way to make it tolerable, and along the way, he made a few friends. Anyone who has read one of his books can attest to that.
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