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Question
#57507. RaeRae55
asks:
Who is the best-selling American author of all time?
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MrsAce
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Erle Stanley Gardner
July 17th - It's the birthday of American mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner, born in Malden, Massachusetts (1889). He wrote over eighty mystery novels featuring the brilliant lawyer, Perry Mason. He was the best-selling American author of all time. He sold over 200 million copies of his books, and at the peak of his success he sold about 26,000 books a day. Gardner was kicked out of Valparaiso University after getting into a fistfight in his first semester. He went to work as a typist in a law office in California. He read so much of what he typed that he decided to take the bar exam. He passed it without any classes, at age twenty-two. He went to work for a corporate law firm in Oxnard, California, and he defended poor Chinese and Mexican immigrants. He worked in law for twenty-two years, and he often wrote on the side. He became a popular contributor to Black Mask Magazine. They liked stories with Oriental heroes and villains, so he came up with many adventures of Soo Hoo Duck, King of Chinatown. He sent mysteries and western stories to pulp magazines at an incredible rate. He hired a team of secretaries to take down his dictations, and at one point he was producing 66,000 words a week for the pulps. Soon, he settled into writing his Perry Mason novels, one at a time, and gave them titles like The Case of the Amorous Aunt (1963) and The Case of the Fabulous Fake (1969). Erle Gardner said, "I write to make money, and I write to give the reader sheer fun."
More info at:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erle_Stanley_Gardner
Jun 03 05, 9:01 AM
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MrsAce
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Stephen King, which is the correct answer, would have been my next guess.
Jun 10 05, 4:14 PM
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