Source: "Six Decades of Doc Savage," in Doc Savage Omnibus #13, Bantam Books, 1990, pp. 419-30.

No one writer or editor conceived Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, whose adventures originally appeared in Doc Savage Magazine, which ran 181 issues from March 1933 to the Summer 1949 issue. Doc was the product of the greatest hero-making factory ever—he Street & Smith Publishing Company, which had been responsible for such still-famous icons as Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill, and Frank Merriwell during its dime-novel days and, after they switched over to publishing pulp magazines, new heroes like The Shadow, The Avenger, Bill Barnes, and many others.

Doc Savage came into being by accident. The accident was the mania caused by a popular radio show The Detective Story Hour, which in 1931 sponsored by Street & Smith's announcer known only as The Shadow.

The Shadow's creepy voice electrified Depression-era America. It also electrified Street & Smith business manager Henry W. Ralston when he realized that such fame was sure to create imitators and knockoffs. He commissioned a one-shot magazine to trademark The Shadow's name.

Perhaps Ralston was surprised when the first issue of The Shadow sold out. Perhaps not. For Ralston had been a fan of Street & Smith's dime-novel heroes during his youth, and had particularly doted on Nick Carter. During the summer of 1898 he first went to work in the Street & Smith mail room, and liked it so much he quit Aldelphi College to make the firm his career.

By 1931 he was a business manager in charge of the growing Street & Smith pulp-magazine line. Impressed by the time reading public's appetite for The Shadow, Ralston guessed the time was ripe to revive the kind of virtuous, two-fisted heroes he loved in his dime novel-devouring youth. He began laying plans for a revival of Nick Carter and for a new adventure character. Not another wisecracking roughneck such as ran through the pages of countless rival pulps, but one who would tower over them all. "The supreme adventurer," Ralston dubbed his nameless hero, envisioning him as "the poor man's Monte Cristo."

Ralston's thoughts drifted back to a colorful man he had once known, a tall, steely-eyed soldier, diplomat, engineer, lawyer, and author of over forty books, including A Monte Cristo in Khaki, whom Street & Smith had published.

A man named Savage.

Colonel Richard Henry Savage (1846-1903) is a forgotten man today. A West Point graduate, Savage enjoyed a distinguished military career, beginning with the U.S. Corps of Engineers and a stint in the Egyptian Army. He went on to become U.S. vice-consul in Rome and Marseilles, joint commissioner on the Texas-Mexico frontier, and chief engineer of the Corpus Cristi and Rio Grande Railroad. He passed the bar in 1890, and the next year published his first book, My Official Wife, later made into a silent film. It proved so successful Savage stopped practicing law. When the Spanish-American War broke out he reenlisted, seeing combat in Cuba. It is said Savage personally hoisted the first U.S. flag over conquered Havana.

And although his death was ignominious—on October 3, 1903, Colonel Savage was run over by a horse-drawn delivery wagon while crossing Sixth Avenue in Manhattan—Ralston thought Savage the perfect model for the hero he had in mind.

Since Ralston had plans to update old Nick Carter as a hard-boiled detective, he looted the original Nick of elements he liked. Nick had been raised by his father to be the perfect specimen of humanity, physically powerful and intellectually keen. So, too, would the new character be. But rather than possessing just the required skills of a master detective, Ralston's hero would be a true superman—superhumanly strong as well as the ultimate expert in every field. And like Nick Carter, he would live by the Carter family's old code: "Keep your mind, your body, and your conscience clean." Updated, of course.

Ralston had a premise and a last name. But not a first name. It was traditional for dime-novel heroes to be christened to reflect their dominant qualities. Thus, Frank Merriwell—an athlete who was truthful, good-humored, and healthy. Since Ralston already had a surname that signified his supreme adventurer's physical prowess, he gave him a thinking man's first name. Clark, after the most popular actor of that day, Clark Gable. His nickname would be indicative of his great scientific knowledge: Doc.

Thus, Doc Savage—a genius in the body of a Hercules.

Ralston bounced the developing Doc Savage off a new Street & Smith editor he'd hired for The Shadow. John L. Nanovic was fresh out of Notre Dame and bursting with ideas. They decided Doc would have a group of assistants, as Frank Merriwell had. Under Ralston's guidance Nanovic prepared a lengthy blueprint for the first Doc Savage novel and sketched out the characters of Doc and his four aides, each of whom were inspired by historical figures and colorful people Ralston had known. A Ralston acquaintance named Ham Peck became Ham Brooks, for instance, and Thomas Jefferson, whose nickname had been "Long Tom," served as Long Tom Robert's namesake.

By the fall of 1932, after months of planning, Ralston and Nanovic had everything they needed to launch Doc Savage Magazine. Except a writer.

Enter Lester Dent, a six-foot-two former telegraph operator and Missouri farmboy. Dent had sold his first pulp story to Street & Smith's Top-Notch Magazine in 1929. Ralston noticed one of Dent's stories, The Sinister Ray, in a rival pulp magazine. It featured a scientific detective obviously patterned after Arthur B. Reeve's then-popular scientific detective, Craig Kennedy, battling a superscientific menace with inventive gadgets. This was exactly the modern approach Ralston wanted for Doc Savage.

Dent was offered the opportunity to write a Shadow novel, and produced The Golden Vulture. This proved to Ralston and Nanovic that he could deliver an exciting novel, and Dent was let in on their plans. The original Doc Savage blueprint, called Doc Savage: Supreme Adventurer, was only twenty-eight pages long. There was a lot of room for further development.

An imaginative man, Dent had ideas of his own. He wanted to change Doc Savage's name. Ralston balked; he saw Doc Savage as his brainchild. Dent also objected to Doc's trilling sound, later calling it "a patent steal from The Shadow." To the original group of four Doc Savage aides, Dent added a fifth—Renny Ren-wick—and remodeled the others after earlier pulp characters he had written.

Although Ralston originated Doc, Lester Dent fleshed out the character, putting an entirely different spin on the Man of Bronze than Ralston ever dreamed. As Dent once explained it:

I looked at what people had gone for already. So I took Sherlock Holmes with his deductive ability, Tarzan of the Apes with his towering physique and muscular ability, Craig Kennedy with his scientific knowledge, and Abraham Lincoln with his Christliness. Then I rolled 'em all into one to get—Doc Savage.

Years later Ralston recalled Doc this way:

We grabbed him right out of thin air. We made him a surgeon and scientist, because we wanted him to know chemistry, philosophy, and all that stuff. We also made him immensely wealthy—he'd inherited a huge fortune from his father. He crusaded against crime of all kinds—plots against the United States, against industry, against society at large. He was very strong physically, a giant of a man of bronze, with eyes whose pupils resembled pools of flake gold, always in gentle motion.

No one remembers who envisioned Doc's metal motif. Bronzed, metallic-haired characters had appeared in Dent pulp stories before Doc Savage. He was also a fan of an Argosy magazine hero called Peter the Raven, sometimes called the Man of Bronze, so Dent likely dreamed up those elements.

The source for Doc's flake-gold eyes is noteworthy. During the summer of 1932, while waiting for Ralston and Nanovic to give him the go-ahead on Doc Savage, Dent went to Death Valley to prospect for gold. He was fascinated by the stories surrounding Death Valley Scotty, a hermit who lived in a magnificent desert castle maintained, it was said, by a secret source of gold. Although Dent never found Scotty's gold mine, he did return with a vial of golden flakes he'd panned from a river.

Those shifting gold flakes inspired Doc's unique eyes.

And the experience gave him the idea for Doc Savage's secret source of gold in the Valley of the Vanished in Central America. Scotty's castle may have given Dent the idea for Doc's mysterious Fortress of Solitude—later appropriated by Superman—although its design apparently came from a favorite childhood book containing instructions for building an eskimo igloo. Impressed by the brand-new Empire State Building, Dent selected it as Doc Savage's headquarters.

After expanding the basic Doc Savage elements in a black notebook used as a writing reference, Lester Dent sat down to writer the premier Doc Savage novel, The Man of Bronze, in December 1932. It was based on Doc Savage: Supreme Adventurer, which contained the same device used to launch Nick Carter's career—the death of the hero's father. He finished the novel three week's later and immediately started on the second, The Land of Terror. By the time the first issue of Doc Savage Magazine appeared on the third Friday of February 1933, Dent had already written four Doc novels.

The timing seemed to be perfect. It was the worst year of the Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt had just declared his famous bank holiday. King Kong was about to premiere nationwide. America craved escape and an untarnished hero.

Lester Dent gave it something more. He produced the world's first superhero, one who inspired later heroes as diverse as Superman and Star Trek's Mr. Spock.

Like The Shadow, Doc Savage Magazine became an overnight success. Soon it was selling as well as The Shadow—a reported two-hundred thousand copies each month—and this without a radio show to promote it. That soon changed. In 1934 a Doc Savage radio show was syndicated nationally, written by no less than Lester Dent himself.

Sometime in 1934 the pressure of all this frenetic writing finally caught up with Dent. While hunched over his typewriter, he looked up to see two of his characters standing there. They started a conversation and Dent answered. When it sank in that he was conversing with figments of his own imagination, Lester Dent took off for a sudden and very necessary Florida vacation. There he was bitten again by the treasure-hunting bug and bought an ungainly boat, the Albatross, on which he and his wife, Norma, lived. He wrote Doc Savage, hunted treasure with a magnetic metal detector right out of Doc Savage, and calmed his frazzled nerves.

In 1935 Street & Smith made a decision calculated to give Dent a permanent nervous breakdown. It laid plans to publish Doc Savage every two weeks, as they were doing with The Shadow. Dent, who had his sights on one day escaping the low-paying pulp magazine market, refused to take on such a crushing burden. Street & Smith quickly hired a pinch-hitter Kenneth Robeson named Laurence Donovan, who ultimately contributed nine Doc Savages, ranging from the excellent Cold Death to the terrible Land of Long Juju. (Donovan's Docs have sometimes been miscredited to another pulp writer, Norman A. Daniels, who never contributed to the series.)

Ultimately, Street & Smith reconsidered, and Doc Savage continued as a monthly.

Luckily for Lester Dent, Harold Davis ultimately learned to write Doc novels well enough that Dent no longer needed to rewrite him so heavily—or at all. He was responsible for Docs such as Merchants of Disaster, The Living-Fire Menace, The Munitions Master, and others. Dent was so confident in his friend that in 1937 he allowed Davis to write The Golden Peril—the long awaited sequel to The Man of Bronze.

But Davis alone wasn't enough. So in 1938 Dent hired a former Doc Savage associate editor, William G. Bogart, to back up Davis. Although not as imaginative as Davis, Bogart proved a fast and competent Kenneth Robeson, beginning with his first Doc, World's Fair Goblin. Bogart would go on to write fourteen Docs, among them Hex and The Angry Ghost, making him the most prolific Doc ghost writer.

Dent, who had aspirations of following fellow pulp writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to greater writing fame, probably would have eventually turned Doc Savage over to his growing battery of ghosts, but for circumstances that conspired against his plans.

Early in 1940 Harold Davis was hired as Newsday's first managing editor. That left Dent with just Bogart. Street & Smith brought in a crony of Davis, newspaperman Alan Hathway, to pick up the slack, but Hathway was transferred to another Street & Smith magazine hero, The Whisperer, after writing The Headless Men and three other Docs. Later he would also replace Davis as Newsday's managing editor.

Then, on Christmas Eve 1940, Dent was informed that his Doc Savage rate had been reduced due to a company-wide austerity move. It was a sad Christmas that year. Effectively, this ended Dent's ability to afford ghost writers and quashed his plans to move on. He had just hired the writing team of pulp editors Jack Schiff and Mort Weisinger to write Birds of Death. Unable to afford their services, he wrote the novel himself.

By this time, Dent had sold his boat and left New York for his hometown, La Plata, Missouri, where he built a house which boasted more gadgets than Doc Savage's headquarters. He took up flying light planes, and continued grinding out a Doc Savage novel every month without fail.

Punishing competition from radio and comic books began to eat away at the pulp audience, and with World War II raging in Europe and Asia, Street & Smith found itself losing not only readers, but writers, artists, and editors as the draft swept up many men of fighting age. Paper shortages shrank its pulp line, and in 1943 John L. Nanovic moved on after a brilliant decade guiding Doc Savage's editorial destiny. He was replaced by Charles Moran, who decided Doc Savage needed to be updated. He instructed a reluctant Lester Dent to retool his writing style and make Doc Savage less of a superman, made him scrap his original plot to Death Had Yellow Eyes and The Derelict of Skull Shoal and write them as suspense novels. The latter story was run under Dent's name at his request—a decision soon reversed by Henry Ralston.

Although Moran was replaced by William DeGrouchy after six months, his editorial dictates forever changed the tone of the Doc Savage stories. This was the era of tense, realistic war-era Doc novels such as Violent Night and The Shape of Terror. As Moran told Dent:

Doc should always be the plausible man, ready to come to grips with wrongdoers, eager for combat, though not a superman who bowls over mountains if they get in his way.

The novels were much shorter in this phase, since Doc Savage had become digest sized. Dent didn't find the shorter length any easier to write. He struggled with the new restrictions and an edict that Doc could no longer rely on his familiar gadgets.

By 1945, with the war over, Dent again looked toward the day he would bolt from the pulps to the next plateau of writing. His old rate had been restored by Moran, so he rehired both Harold Davis and William Bogart. But Davis's new story, The Exploding Lake, proved so much a throwback to the pre-Moran Doc Savage that Dent was forced to completely rewrite it. Street & Smith's efforts to find a writer on its own were dropped when first choice, John D. MacDonanld, declined to pen a Doc novel. To Dent's relief, William Bogart slid comfortably back into the Kenneth Robeson groove—so comfortably, in fact, that Dent temporarily turned the series over to him. It was Dent's hope that he could at last give up being Kenneth Robeson.

Events once more conspired to thwart his plans. Doc Savage was rechristened Doc Savage, Scientist Detective and scaled back to bimonthly frequency. His Doc income reduced by half, Dent released Bogart and hunkered down to the new mystery-oriented Doc Savage. Although it was an unhappy event for Dent, he took advantage of the new editorial guidelines under his latest editor, Babette Rosmond, and experimented with fresh approaches to what was by now a very old chore. It was in this period that Dent produced the quintet of Docs told in the first person. He also recycled several unsold mystery novels into Docs, which explains why some later stories such as The Devil Is Jones and Death Is a Round Black Spot, read strangely. Originally, they were not Doc novels!

By 1948 the Street & Smith pulp line was on its last legs. Doc Savage, Scientist Detective still sold reasonably well, but the pulp industry in general had fallen on hard times, the victim of increasing competition from the burgeoning paperback book and the new home entertainment phenomenon, television—which Doc had been experimenting with as far back as 1933. In a last-ditch effort to restore sales, the firm restored its digests to magazine size and put them under the editorial control of the improbably named Daisy Bacon. Bacon found Dent churning out polished Cold War stories such as Terror Wears No Shoes, and put a quick stop to this latest new direction. One Doc novel, The Red Spider, fell through the cracks during the transition, and finally saw print in 1979 under the Bantam Books colophon.

Dent found it hard working with Daisy Bacon, even though she wanted him to return to the original high-adventure slant. Bacon complained about Dent's work, often criticizing or rejecting his plots. She had Dent revise the first of the retro-thirties Docs, The Green Master, and forced him to replot the next, Return from Cormoral, several times before she was satisfied.

In frustration Dent wrote Bacon a long letter outlining various Doc Savage plot ideas, hoping to hit upon one that she would like. One of these plots concerned a man who, while exploring a cavern, uncovers the entrance to hell and is pursued by an imp.

Bacon liked the idea, but thought Dent's suggested ending—that it was all hoax—too much of a cheat and suggested he give the story a fantasy twist. Dent's opinion of the suggestion is not known. He had always avoided the supernatural in his fiction. But Bacon was his editor and he duly gave her what she wanted.

Thus, the classic Up from Earth's Center actually came about by accident! Dent had no inkling it would mark the end of the series. In fact, he was preparing another Doc plot when Bacon asked him to hold off. Street & Smith had instituted a buying freeze on their entire pulp line, which had been rolled back to quarterly publication.

While awaiting further word, Lester Dent suffered a heart attack. He was recuperating when he received the news. Doc Savage had been cancelled. Not due to sales, but because Street & Smith had decided to fold its entire pulp-magazine and comic-book line to concentrate on their growing string of women's magazines such as Mademoiselle.

Doc continued in Great Britain and elsewhere in reprint and translation, while Lester Dent settled down to farming and occasional writing. Unhappy over Street & Smith's abandonment of its heroes, Henry Ralston retired in 1950. And Street & Smith became absorbed by Condé Nast Publications in 1961 after nearly a century in business. Today, the company name survives only on the mastheads of sports annuals.

It would be fifteen years before Doc Savage would return in Bantam Books editions. Lester Dent, who once scoffed at the idea of reprinting his Doc novels, saying "they would be so outdated today they would undoubtedly be funny," never lived to see that day. He died on March 11, 1959, while convalescing at the Grim Smith Hospital in Kirksville, Missouri. He had suffered another, fatal heart attack.

The man who wrote the best of the Doc Savage series would never write again.

But this was not the end of Doc.

In October 1964, with the simultaneous release of Kenneth Robeson's The Man of Bronze, The Thousand-Headed Man, and Meteor Menace, Bantam Books began its ambitious Doc Savage reprint program. No one then could have imagined more than a dozen or so of these Depression-vintage pulp adventure novels would ever see paperback editions.

For in 1964 the concept of packaging a paperback series in consecutively numbered editions was untried. Adventure heroes of Doc Savage's era were considered passe. This was the time of James Bond, Mike Hammer, and other cynical types. What chance had a Galahadian relic known as the Man of Bronze

Surprisingly, Doc Savage caught on. Soon the books were being released on an unheard-of monthly schedule and selling millions of copies. All through the 1960s and 1970s a new Doc Savage reprint was a familiar sight on bookstore and newsstand racks. They were translated into French, German, and Spanish. Time and Newsweek took notice of the phenomenon, quoting from the innumerable Doc Savage fanzines being cranked out by diligent fans. There were Marvel comic-book adaptations. A "biography" of his life was written by the noted author Philip José Farmer. Doc reached the silver screen in 1975 with the release of George Pal's Doc Savage—The Man of Bronze.

But competition from modern adventure series like The Executioner, The Destroyer, and countless others—all of which borrowed the Doc Savage numbered-package format—pushed Doc into the background during the late seventies. Bantam, looking for new ways to keep the series going, published a lost Doc Savage novel, The Red Spider, in 1979 amid much fanfare.

It took Bantam Books until October, 1990 with the publication of Doc Savage Omnibus #13 to finally reprint every installment. A year later, the publisher inaugurated a series of new adventures, beginning with Philip José Farmer's Escape from Loki. There followed seven period Docs, written by Will Murray from Lester Dent's unused outlines and uncompleted manuscripts. These were Python Isle, White Eyes, The Frightened Fish, The Jade Ogre, Flight into Fear, The Whistling Wraith, and The Forgotten Realm.

The venerable series ended in 1993, sixty years after it was launched, with its 190th entry. A further revival is not out of the question.