Johnston McCulley

Johnston McCulley (February 2, 1883 – November 23, 1958) was the author of hundreds of stories, fifty novels, numerous screenplays for film and television, and the creator of the character Zorro.

Many of his novels and stories were written under the pseudonyms Harrington Strong, Raley Brien, George Drayne, Monica Morton, Rowena Raley, Frederic Phelps, Walter Pierson, and John Mack Stone, among others.

McCulley started as a police reporter for The Police Gazette and served as an Army public affairs officer during World War I. An amateur history buff, he went on to a career in pulp magazines and screenplays, often using a Southern California backdrop for his stories.

Aside from Zorro, McCulley created many other pulp characters, including Black Star, The Spider, The Mongoose, and Thubway Tham. Many of McCulley's characters — The Green Ghost, The Thunderbolt, and The Crimson Clown — were inspirations for the masked heroes that have appeared in popular culture from McCulley's time to the present day.

Born in Ottawa, Illinois, and raised in Chillicothe, Illinois, he died in 1958 in Los Angeles, California, aged 75.

Some of McCulley's tales are available from Wildside Press and Altus Press. Pulp Adventures Inc. has published two oversized trade paperback volumes reprinting many of the original Zorro stories.

McCulley's Zorro character, reminiscent of Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel, was first serialized in the story "The Curse of Capistrano" in 1919 in the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly.

Zorro became his most enduring character, appearing in four novels (the last three were all serialized in Argosy Magazine, which had absorbed All-Story). The first appeared in 1919 and the second in 1922, after which there was a significant gap before the appearance of the third novel, Zorro Rides Again, in 1931. The appearance of the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks silent movie The Mark of Zorro, based on the first novel, was the direct cause for McCulley's reviving what had originally been a one-time hero plot.

...
Wikipedia