Walter B. Gibson

Walter Brown Gibson
Born	September 12, 1897 Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Died	December 6, 1985(1985-12-06) (aged 88) Kingston, New York, United States
Pen name	Maxwell Grant (shared)
Occupation	Author and magician
Nationality	American
Genre	comic books, comic strips, hypnotism, magic, psychic phenomena, pulp magazines, true crime, yoga

Walter Brown Gibson (September 12, 1897 – December 6, 1985) was an American author and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow. Gibson, under the pen-name Maxwell Grant, wrote "more than 300 novel-length" Shadow stories, writing up to "10,000 words a day" to satisfy public demand during the character's golden age in the 1930s and 1940s. 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.

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 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. It was Gibson who created all the mythos and characterization of The Shadow, including his alter ego of wealthy playboy Lamont Cranston.

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