Gordon Young (writer)

Gordon Young (1886–1948) was an American writer of adventure and western stories.

Young was born in Ray County, Missouri. He worked as a cowboy and served in the United States Marine Corps in the Philippines, before moving to Los Angeles and taking a job at the Los Angeles Times in 1914. Young eventually became Literary Editor of the newspaper; one of his correspondents was Sinclair Lewis.

He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, February 10, 1948.

Writing career
Gordon Young began writing fiction for the magazine Adventure in 1917. Young's first stories for Adventure were a series of crime thrillers about a gun-wielding gambler, Don Everhard. Magazine historian Robert Sampson argued the Don Everhard stories influenced later writers of Hardboiled crime fiction such as Carroll John Daly. Young soon became one of the most popular of Arthur Sullivant Hoffman's roster of authors for Adventure. He followed the Everhard stories with a series of South Seas tales about Hurricane Williams, an adventurer who shuns "civilized" society. Young's novel, Days of '49 (1925), a historical narrative about the settlement of California, was well received by contemporary reviewers.

Young's humorous Westerns about "Red" Clark, became his most commercially successful series; these tales first appeared in Adventure and Short Stories before being collected in book form. The Clark stories were especially popular in Britain and most of the stories appeared in hardbacks for the UK library market.

Several of Gordon Young's stories were adapted for the cinema, including the 1936 film Captain Calamity.