Walter B. Gibson

Walter Brown Gibson (September 12, 1897 – December 6, 1985) was an American writer and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow, and as a ghost-writer for many of his friend Harry Houdini's books. Gibson, under the pen-name Maxwell Grant, wrote 282 of the original 325 'The Shadow' novels/novellas during the 1930s/1940s, writing up to "10,000 words a day" to satisfy public demand during the character's golden age. He authored several novels in the Biff Brewster juvenile series of the 1960s. He was married to Litzka R. Gibson, also a writer, and the couple lived in New York state.

Early life

Walter Brown Gibson was born on September 12, 1897, in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Alfred Cornelius Gibson (1849–1931) and May Morrell Whidden Gibson (1863–1941).

Gibson graduated from Colgate University in 1920 where he was a brother of Delta Kappa Epsilon, and began working "for newspapers in his native Philadelphia as a reporter and crossword-puzzle writer," specifically for The North American, and later The Evening Ledger. In 1923–1924, he provided illustrated single-page articles for Science and Invention magazine describing various tricks and puzzles. In 1927, he founded and edited the pulp magazine Tales of Magic and Mystery, which ran for five issues, ending in April 1928. In 1928 Gibson was asked by Macfadden Publications to edit True Strange Stories; he did, for a time, identified as Walter Scofield, commuting back and forth to New York. In 1931, after submitting some crime stories for Detective Story Magazine, he was asked by publishers Street & Smith to produce the first print adventure of The Shadow, who at that stage was merely a voice, the mysterious narrator of the Street & Smith-sponsored Detective Stories radio drama.