Norvell Wordsworth Page July 6, 1904 Richmond, Virginia, US
Died
August 14, 1961 (aged 57)
Occupation
Writer
journalist
editor
intelligence worker
Norvell Wordsworth Page (July 6, 1904 – August 14, 1961) was an American pulp fiction writer, journalist and editor who later became a government intelligence worker. He is best known as the prolific writer of The Spider pulp magazine novels (1933–1943).[1][2]
Early life
He was born in Virginia, the son of Charles Wordsworth Page (1880–1947) and Estlie Isabelle Bethel Page (1880–1946). The name Norvell came from his maternal grandmother Elvira Russell Norvell Page.
Page spent 12 years as a newspaperman, doing many dirty jobs and seeing many corpses in the morgues. When he did start writing, it was western stories, a subject he knew nothing about, but they sold. Finally the editor who bought the stories suggested he write about something he knew, like gangsters. One of Page's earliest stories was a mystery story, "The Devil Muscles In", written for the November 1930 issue of Detective-Dragnet Magazine, as by N. Wooten Page.[2] In October 1933, Popular Publications launched The Spider magazine, about the titular hero. Popular hoped The Spider would imitate the enormous success of Street & Smith'sThe Shadow. Page wrote a backup story in the first issue of The Spider pulp, "Murder Undercover", and by the third issue was writing the main Spider stories.[2] This continued with great success till he seemed to have a nervous breakdown while writing "the Living Pharaoh" serial and took a nine-month break from writing before returning to writing relatively tame stories about G-Men (in Ace G-Man Stories) and detective stories.
He is best known as the author of the majority of the adventures of that ruthless vigilante hero The Spider, which he and a handful of other writers wrote under the house name of Grant Stockbridge. The Spider was a crime-fighter in the tradition of The Shadow, wanted by the law for executing his criminal antagonists, and prefigured later comic booksuperheroes like Batman. Page's innovations to the series included a hideous disguise for the hero and a succession of super-scientific menaces for him to combat. One of these, involving an invasion of giant robots, was copied by an early Superman story and helped inspire the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.[4]
He also contributed to other pulp series, including The Black Bat and The Phantom Detective, and supplied scripts for the radio programs based on the characters he wrote, science fiction and two early sword and sorceryfantasy novels under forms of his real name, Norvel Page and Norvell W. Page. His 1940 Unknown novel But Without Horns is considered an early classic explication of the superman theme.[2] Under the pen name of N. Wooten Poge, Page wrote the adventures of Bill Carter for Spicy Detective Stories. His works only saw magazine publication during his lifetime, but his fantasies and some of the Spider novels were later reprinted as paperbacks.[2]
The setting of Page's sword and sorcery novels is central Asia in the first century A.D., when the legendary Prester John supposedly established a Christian kingdom there. In Page's conception, the man behind the legend was hard-bitten Mediterranean adventurer Hurricane John, or Wan Tengri, a hero in the mold of Robert E. Howard's Conan, though more humorous, verbose, and exaggeratedly omnicompetent as a warrior.[2] He comes close to taking over two cities in the course of his travels, but the series concludes before he establishes his empire. He was featured two stories Flame Winds and Sons of the Bear God. The magic John encounters is unconvincingly rationalized.[5]
Page was elected as president of the American Fiction Guild, serving the year from November 1934 through October 1935.[6]
In 1943 he began working for the US government, including the Atomic Energy Commission, the President's Scientific Research Board, the President's Ten Year Health Program, the two Hoover Commissions, and the President's Materials Policy Commission.[3]
^American Fiction Guild Bulletin #19, November 5, 1934.
Will Murray gives a good write up on Page in his foreword for the "G Stands For Glory" Kindle book of Page's detective stories, some of which is used in the main article on this page.
External links
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