The Untamed
Max Brand
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, May 18, 2017)
The Untamed by Max Brand. The mysterious Whistlin' Dan Barry rides a black stallion named Satan, followed by a wolf dog named Black Bart. Dan has his own problems, but they multiply when he encounters Jim Silent and his outlaw gang. How Jim Silent, the “long—rider” and outlaw, declared feud with Dan, how of his right—hand men one strove for the Girl, one for the horse, and one to “’get’ that black devil of a dog,” and their desperate efforts to achieve their ends, form but part of the stirring action. A tale of the West, yes–but a most unusual one, touched with an almost weird poetic fancy from the very first page, when over the sandy wastes sounds the clear sweet whistling of Pan of the desert, to the very last paragraph when the reader, too, hears the cry and the call of the wild geese flying south. Frederick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) was an American fiction author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary Westerns. Faust wrote mostly under pen names, and today he is primarily known by one, Max Brand. Others include George Owen Baxter, Martin Dexter, Evin Evans, David Manning, Peter Dawson, John Frederick, and Pete Morland. Faust was born in Seattle. He grew up in central California and later worked as a cowhand on one of the many ranches of the San Joaquin Valley. Faust attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he began to write frequently. During the 1910s, Faust started to sell stories to the many emerging pulp magazines of the era. In the 1920s, Faust wrote furiously in many genres, achieving success and fame, first in the pulps and later in the upscale "slick" magazines. His love for mythology was, however, a constant source of inspiration for his fiction and his classical and literary inclinations. The classical influences are particularly noticeable in his first novel The Untamed (1919), which was also made into a motion picture starring Tom Mix in 1920. Max Brand, one of America's most popular and prolific novelists and author of such enduring works as Destry Rides Again and the Doctor Kildare stories, died on the Italian front in 1944.