Brand was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, but did not graduate. During his college days, he was a contributor to campus publications. After leaving school, he went to New York and published some poetry and began writing western novels. Brand's enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words or the equivalent of 530 ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, westerns, science-fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, big busines, big medicine, and fashionable society. When the United States entered the Second World War, Brand, at the age of fifty-one, abandoned his writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy. He was killed during an attack on a hilltop village held by the Germans. New books based on magazine serials, unpublished manuscripts, or restored versions continue to appear. Some of his works of note are The Untamed (1919), The Night Horseman (1920), The Iron Trail (1926), Riders of the Plains (1926), Destry Rides Again (1930), Dead or Alive (1932) and the series of novels about Dr. Kildare produced in the late 1930's and early 1940's. |
