E.B. Mann - Biography of western author

Found a biography of author E.B. Mann while looking for something else. He started his pulp career in 1928 with a story in Ranch Romances, went on to be published in the main Western magazines - Ace-High, Western Story, Wild West Weekly, Dime Western and Star Western. His pulp career ended in 1933 with about 80 stories published in the pulps, and 8 movies based on his stories.

Adventure, January 1937 issue with E.B. Mann story featured on the cover
Image courtesy the FictionMags Index

The following is biographical information from the Camp-Fire column in the Adventure, January 1937 issue where Mann had his only story but getting the cover nevertheless for The Comanche Kid.

...

E. B. Mann makes his first appearance in our magazine—a new member of the Writers’ Brigade which has marched for twenty-six years and included most of the noted American men authors in its ranks. Mann lives in Florida. His story you will judge for yourself, and I hope you will like the people in it as well as I did. Mann makes this introduction of himself to the Camp-Fire circle.

I would have said, if asked, that my life so far had been an interesting one. I’ve found it interesting, and amusing, and even—from time to time—exciting. Yet when I come to setting it down on paper it seems insipid stuff, like last night’s beer. . . . Perhaps it’s asking too much to expect a fictioneer to stick to facts!

I was born in Kansas in 1902; was graduated from Decatur County (Kansas) High School in 1920, and for some time after that I traveled—mostly as a non-paying passenger—from Butte to the Brazos and to and fro. The trails my father had traveled in a covered wagon I traveled in boxcars and in Pullmans, working on ranches here and there, following the wheat harvest, wielding a billiard cue, setting type in various print-shops, earning a little, learning a little. I heard the lingo and the legends of the west from childhood on, and read omnivorously.

I came to Florida with the birth of “The Boom” but I went to college while the other boys sold subdivisions. They made more money than I did, but they lost more too when the bubble burst. I had played football in high school and baseball afterward; in college, I played politics and found the game more fun, if not more profitable.

I arrived in New York City in 1927 and within a month I knew men in scores of fine offices all up and down Manhattan Island. They had said, “No,” when I asked them for jobs. One gentleman finally said, “Yes,” and I became an advertising man.

I sold my first story in March, 1928, and bought an overcoat. I needed it.

Some six months later I said goodbye, with some regrets, to advertising and devoted all my time to the writing of the franker forms of fiction.

Was married in 1928 to Helen Frazier Cubberly.

Children: none.

Recreations: Tennis; shooting.

Hobby: guns.

Ambitions? To live pleasantly; to acquire a backhand drive; to shoot a shotgun as well as I do a pistol; to have a hand in the redemption of the western story from its past and present low estate.

And the article i found, that has a photo and a much longer biography, is here:

https://ochf.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/693/

Arthur S. Hoffman's departure from Adventure magazine - an update

A long time ago, when I published my first article on Arthur S. Hoffman, I mentioned that he probably left because the management changes to the editorial direction of Adventure magazine were not to his liking. Walker Martin disagreed with me on this, saying Hoffman wanted to make Adventure a higher quality magazine, and his decision to depart was not due to the management change. At the time, I thought we wouldn't resolve this until we found any other evidence. Well, I've found new evidence and here it is (from one of the magazines I acquired at the Windy City Pulp convention 2014).

From the Camp-Fire, 1 February 1935:

A FINE bright blaze crackles this time in the Camp-Fire. Thousands of comrades who have been in the circle year in and year out will feel the warm and cheerful glow on their faces. We have a message from one of the few great editors—the man who conducted our magazine with so much ability and honest enthusiasm that readers gave him a truly remarkable response of loyalty and friendliness. No large group of readers is so loyal as the older guard of Adventure. They are an unusual army of well-read and friendly men, and at their head still marches the talented comrade who sends us this greeting:

Carmel, N.Y.

 

Dear Comrades of the Camp-Fire:—

Is there room around the Fire for one of its old-timers? No adventures to tell about, but as I was the fellow who gathered the first wood and struck the first spark for this Camp-Fire of ours, maybe there's still a place for me to sit and listen to the others after I've given an account of myself.

I admit it: I've not been coming to the meetings. To make a long story short, when I resigned as editor of our magazine, I was more glad than sorry to do so. Partly because I was going to a better paying job but chiefly because it had become more and more plain to me that the new ownership (at that time) was set upon making changes in the magazine that seemed to me to doom it to go downhill. They even spoke of abolishing Camp-Fire and Ask Adventure as well as all other departments. After working hard for seventeen years to build up the magazine I naturally didn't want to stay and see it crumble away. Still less did I want to be held responsible by the readers for things I did not approve and could not prevent.

Well, our magazine did what I had foreseen—went downhill. Many a one of you has written me bemoaning that fact. A number of editors tried their hands; I do not think any editor could have made a success of the program and under the limitations laid down from above. Personally, I stopped reading the magazine. Camp-Fire at times seemed a mere travesty of what it had once been; I missed the old spirit among you, despite the faithful who did their best to keep things as they had been.

One day last summer, on one of my infrequent trips from the country, I stopped in to see Joe Cox of our old staff, having learned he'd returned to the magazine after its purchase by Popular Publications. I met the present editor and we went to lunch. We talked.

Then we talked more frankly, and for a long time. About nothing except the magazine and Camp-Fire.

On another visit we talked again, and this time one of the publishers sat in on our informal session.

And so I've come back to Camp-Fire.

No, I have no connection with the magazine in any way except as a reader.

I've come back merely as one of the Camp-Fire gang. Because, for the first time since some seven years ago, our magazine has an ownership and an editor who really understand it as we understand it and whose aim is to make it all that we used to find it. As I know from experience, it takes time to build up what we had, for what we had was not just printed words on pages but a spirit of comradeship and understanding that grew up among us. But now we're not only on our way, but picking up speed.

Some of you never deserted the Fire, so it could not die out entirely. Now we have an editor who is really one of us and, back of him, a house that also understands. It looks to me as if the good old times were coming back again.

Apparently it looks the same way to the rest of you, for the circulation has begun to go up steadily. Even during the summer months, dull ones for magazines, it was going up.

And very glad I am to be "home once more. I've been in touch with quite a few of you, both readers and members of our writers' brigade, and hearing occasionally from others, but it's good to be able to shake hands with all my old friends again and to meet the new comrades. Most of us have traveled a long and pleasant road together; there are many memories and old ties and there is good comradeship among us. Our Camp-Fire is now twenty-two years old.

Here's to its next, and better, twenty-two years.

—ARTHUR S. HOFFMAN

Barry Scobee - Auto-biography in Campfire – Adventure, November 8, 1926



Barry Scobee (Photo courtesy Archives of the Big Bend, Bryan Wildenthal Memorial
Library, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas)

AT OUR last meeting we inaugurated the new custom of having the biography of one of our writers at the end of each “Camp-Fire,” so that all readers may come to know personally our old writers as well as those who join us as we go along. This time it’s Barry Scobee.

MR. SCOBEE is an old-timer on Adventure. He is also a down-trodden, luckless man; we have his word for it. He says nothing ever happens to him. When he first wrote for us, back in 1919, he was particularly plaintive about his luck. Here’s what he said then:

“Here’s my luck. I was an attendant in a Keely Cure institute once. No, I wasn’t working my way through. Staying in a room one night to watch a dopey, I was awakened from profound sleep by him standing over me brandishing a razor and a revolver and calling me the man who had run away with his wife. But nothing happened. He forgot me and went to shout out of the window at some woman he insanely took for his wife. I and another man drove an old tin car through the guard into a besieged town once, that being the only available way of getting in. We were taken before the general, who threatened to shoot us. But nothing happened. In an hour we were sipping cognac with the American Consul. I was taking a man to military prison once in the Philippines, on a small steamer, and lost my gun. But nothing happened. The prisoner found it and returned it to me. I have been deer hunting and bob-cat hunting in exceedingly wild country. But nothing happened. The other men got the game. I helped to go to the source of the greatest lost gold-mine story that ever tempted the Southwest. Nothing happened. There wasn’t any mine.”

“Now all that isn’t any laughable matter, believe me. It means that when I concoct a piece of fiction I’ve got to slave like a printer’s devil to work up a climax!”

Mr. Scobee gets locale, settings and fact material for his stories from his own experience. He has “lived around” in the Southwest most of his life, in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, and six years in the Puget Sound region of Washington gave him material for his Northwestern stories. He soldiered in Texas and the Philippines in the regular army, Company H, 9th U.S. Infantry, from November 22, 1907, to November 21, 1910.

So much for the authenticity of his story material. It might be added that some of the stories which he has built around the material and which have appeared in these pages have been mentioned before. His story, “The Wind,” included in O’Brien’s Best Short Stories for 1921, first appeared in Adventure.

AS TO the rest of his dull and uneventful life, here’s Mr. Scobee’s sad story:

He was born May 2, 1885, on his father’s farm near Pollock, Mo., in the northern part of the State. He was educated at the local school, and attended the normal school at Kirksville, Mo., but left before he obtained his degree. Sometime during his early years he learned the printer’s trade at Unionville, Mo.

After school he went to the army for a commission but changed his mind when he got in, though he says he had “no particular kick” against the service. He was post printer in the army, at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, for a year or two, and after his army service ended in November, 1910, spent a year knocking about Missouri.

He took a newspaper job on a daily paper at Pittsburg, Kansas, October 3, 1911, and continued there about three years, with the exception of three months when he worked on a paper at Muskogee, Okla.

He spent winter of 1914 at Corpus Christi, Texas, and lived in San Antonio from January 28, 1915, to February 28, 1917. He has been on the Mexican border, and across in Mexico a little, as a newspaper man on the San Antonio Express, and working for other papers; and was military writer on the Express for some time, being on General Funston’s headquarters when Pershing was in Mexico. He lived in Fort Davis, Texas, March 1, 1917, to August 31, 1918, and in Bellingham, Wash., from June 7, 1919, to September 10, 1925, when he returned to Fort Davis, Texas, from which place he writes us now.

The winter of 1918-19 he spent at and near San Antonio.

He was married at Kansas City, November 24, 1911.

He ran both a country newspaper and a hotel here at Fort Davis in 1917-18, but afterward gave them up.

“RECREATIONS,” says Mr. Scobee, “are hiking up a high mountain now and then, and down again.

“Or riding in cattle round-ups with reglar cowboys, watching how they do, or branding and burning my fingers.

“Studying Indians from their numerous old paintings on the rocks of the Southwest, or their shelters, etc. (Quite amateurish at this.)

“Studying birds and classifying them, and acquiring knowledge of their habits. (Quite an amateur ornithologist, quite amateurish that is.)

“Studying the Mexicans, who are my nearest neighbors, and studying their language and acquiring one new word annually if I’m industrious. Can say manana and “hot tamale” and “a bowl of chili” already, and buenos dias—or something about like that.

“Saw a bank cashier offer a cowboy a chair today. The cowboy kinda blushed and said: ‘By gosh, that’s the first time anybody ever brought me a chair in my life. Reckon I’ll set down in it and try how it goes.’ Nobody ever asked me for my memoirs before until Adventure done so, but unlike the cowboy I can’t enjoy it.

“P.S.—How I happened to be in the bank where the cashier and cowboy got so polite and friendly, was, I went in to fill my fountain pen that I found, as the saying is.”—



Barry Scobee (Photo courtesy Archives of the Big Bend, Bryan Wildenthal Memorial
Library, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas)

 

Nictzin Dyalhis - Auto-biography in Campfire – Adventure, October 10, 1922

Cover of Adventure, October 20, 1922 (courtesy Laurie Powers' Wild West Blog)

From the Camp-Fire, Adventure, 20^th October, 1922, where Nictzin Dyalhis had his first story (Who Keep the Desert Law) published:



Illustration for Who Keep the Desert Law by Nictzin Dyalhis

FOLLOWING Camp-Fire custom Nictzin Dyalhis rises and introduces himself on the occasion of his first story in our magazine:

Sugar Grove, Pennsylvania.

“Hello, the Fire!”

In the old days it paid to stand off and yell, and not approach too close until actually invited. Of course, the invitation is an open one, but even so, although frequently tempted to walk into the light, I have refrained until I felt justified in coming in out of the wet.

BY PROFESSION I am a chemist. In years nearly fifty—-in heart, about sixteen - my wife’s mother says I’ve never grown up! One way she’s quite right, for I am one of these sawed-off, hammered-down, weazened-up runts weighing— when I’m fat-and-sassy—from five to ten pounds over one hundred.

A long time ago I went to the South-west. My intentions were good—I was going to assay all the ore west of the Rockies!

Rex Beach wrote a book once called “Pardners”— in that book an old-timer says: “Thar’s two diseases no doctor has any right meddlin’ with—one’s hoss-racing, t’other’s prospeclin.’” He’s quite right! I know! Assaying? Pooh pooh! An old man, with more pity on my ignorance than I deserved, took me with him on the desert.

Bitten at a tender age, what hope remained for one thus afflicted?

SURE, I’ve done lots of other things since, but—I went one trip snapper-fishing in the Gulf when only a “kid-of-a-boy.” I took one trip and only one “down-de-bay” out of Baltimore on an oyster-dredger in the bad old days of the “pungy,” the “bug-eye,” and the “brogan-canoe”! I’ve signed out on more than one “tall water” cruise, but I invariably turned up missing before the return trip. Because why? Prospectin’ was good somewheres up-country!

I’ve prospected for gold, silver, platinum, tungsten, several of the commercial minerals and, above all, for gems and precious stones, including pearls (fresh-water variety), also, turquoise and ruby (domestic and foreign). Did I ever strike it rich? I’ll say I DID! I’m worth exactly eleven million seven hundred thousand dollars—in experiences which otherwise I might never have had! Money? How do you get that way? I’m dead broke!

“Never made any?” Oh, yes, I did—but I used it! What am I to do when Winter comes? Before next snow-fly I’ll be on the trail again. Following that—I should care! And the worst of it all is— my wife aids and abets me in my sins! And she’s no slouch with a pan, a dry-washer or a jassacks! She can tie all “them” hitches—hackamore, hobble, diamond and squaw. Also, she knows a dang-sight more than I do about pearls.

Now I’ve no contract to use up all the paper in sight, so here we rest—you probably need it after this screed!

And to you about the Fire—may your shadows never grow less! And to those on the trails—may your feet never grew wearied!

And so—Good-night.

—Nictztn Dyalhis

 

For more information on this author who was a prominent science fiction writer and had five cover stories in Weird Tales, see this article.