Lester Dent was an American pulp-fiction writer, best known as the creator and main writer of the series of novels about the scientist and adventurer Doc Savage.
27 Facts About Lester Dent
2.
The 159 Doc Savage novels that Dent wrote over 16 years were credited to the house name Kenneth Robeson.
3.
Lester Dent was the only child of Bernard Dent, a rancher, and Alice Norfolk, a teacher before her marriage.
4.
Lester Dent attended a local one-room school house, often paying for tuition with furs that he had caught.
5.
Around 1919, the Lester Dent family returned to La Plata for good, where Lester Dent's father took up dairy farming.
6.
In 1923, Lester Dent enrolled at Chillicothe Business College in Chillicothe, Missouri.
7.
Lester Dent found out that the starting salary for a telegraph operator was $20 a week more than a bank clerk, so he changed his major to telegraphy.
8.
In 1924, Lester Dent became a telegraph operator for Western Union in Carrollton, Missouri.
9.
One of Lester Dent's co-workers had published a story in a pulp magazine, earning the huge sum of $450.
10.
Lester Dent took advantage of the slow time during the graveyard shift to write.
11.
Lester Dent's first professional sale was an action-adventure story entitled "Pirate Cay"; it appeared in the September 1929 issue of Top Notch magazine.
12.
Shortly after the publication of his story, Lester Dent was contacted by Dell Publishing in New York City.
13.
Lester Dent, stunned by the good fortune, took some time considering the offer, but eventually accepted.
14.
Lester Dent quickly learned the trade of the pulp writer, teaching himself how to write quickly and with few rewrites.
15.
Lester Dent had in mind an adventure hero, which appealed to Dent's love of that genre.
16.
Lester Dent was able to use the freedom that his new-found financial security allowed him, to learn and to explore.
17.
Lester Dent earned both his amateur radio and pilot license, passed both the electricians' and plumbers' trade exams, and was an avid mountain climber.
18.
An example is boating: in May 1934, Lester Dent bought a 40-foot two-masted Chesapeake Bay "bugeye" schooner, Albatross.
19.
Lester Dent was sponsored by fellow pulp writer J Allan Dunn and Navy Reserve Captain Charles Richardson Pond, a member of the family that owned Pond's Cosmetics and a pioneer of transoceanic flight.
20.
Lester Dent was elected to membership on November 9,1936 but was apparently not all that involved in the Club beyond bouncing story ideas off more experienced members.
21.
Lester Dent contributed to a year-long one-time fundraiser for the Club conducted throughout the year 1939, for which he was awarded a sterling silver miniature of the coveted Explorers Club Medal, No 89 of an unknown number of such medallions, with a chain allowing it to be worn as a bracelet.
22.
Lester Dent stopped paying his annual dues in December 1945 and was dropped from membership for this delinquency in January 1948.
23.
Lester Dent continued to write for Doc Savage, but found time to work in the other genres.
24.
Lester Dent's last published short story was a Western entitled "Savage Challenge", published in the February 22,1958 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.
25.
Lester Dent was hospitalized, but subsequently died on March 11,1959.
26.
Lester Dent appears in Craig McDonald's Hector Lassiter novel The Running Kind, which touches on Lester Dent's passion for ham radio and aerial photography enterprises, circa 1950.
27.
Dent's "Master Fiction Plot", often referred to as the "Lester Dent Formula" is a widely circulated guide to writing a salable 6,000-word pulp story.