Frederick Nolan (writer)
British writer
Frederick William Nolan (7 March 1931 – 15 June 2022) was an English editor and writer, mostly known as Frederick Nolan; he also used the pen names Donald Severn, Daniel Rockfern, Christine McGuire, and Frederick H. Christian.
Early life and education
Nolan was born on 7 March 1931 in Liverpool, England, where he was educated, as well as in Aberaeron in Wales.
Career
At the age of 21, Nolan began the research that established him as one of England's leading authorities on the American West. In 1954, he co-founded The English Westerners' Society.
At the start of his career, Nolan became first a reader, and later an editor, for Corgi (Bantam) Books in London. Moving to London in the early 1960s made it possible for him to pursue the other consuming interest of his life: American musical theatre. During this time, he also began writing Western fiction as Frederick H. Christian, a pseudonym derived from his own, his wife Heidi's, and his oldest son's first names.
Over the next decade, while working in publishing – with Transworld, then Penguin, Collins, and Granada in London, and later with Ballantine and Warner in New York – he produced fourteen Westerns as well as a considerable body of journalism.
On 4 July 1973, Nolan quit his job as a highly paid publishing executive and signed a contract to write eight full-length novels in a year. The first of these was The Oshawa Project (published in the U.S. as The Algonquin Project), which MGM later filmed as Brass Target (1978).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Frederick Nolan (writer)” is british writer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Frederick, Nolan and writer, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “british writer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2118745. VIAF identifies the subject as 5114566. The Library of Congress control number is n50005326. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 2022, 1954 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frederick Nolan (writer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.