Biography

Kenneth Robeson was a pseudonym used by Street & Smith, publishers of many "dime novels" and pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. Lester Dent wrote hundreds of adventure stories for them, many featuring his creation, "Doc Savage". A fine book about Doc Savage, "Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life" by Philip José Farmer provides much information about Mr. Dent's life.
- IMDb mini biography by: Bruce Frey <bfrey@midusa.net>

Six-foot Lester Dent was a multi-faceted man--pilot, treasure hunter, amateur architect, clothes-horse dandy--and largely the creator of the world-famous pulp-fiction character Doc Savage, Man of Bronze.

Dent was born in La Plata, Missouri, in 1904 and lived an itinerant youth, working his way across the country--he was once a cowboy on a cattle ranch in Wyoming--before gaining more civilized employment as a telegrapher (he also taught it) in Oklahoma. Married to Norma Gerling in 1925, Dent worked by day and wrote stories at night, and suffered through 13 rejections on 13 stories before the 14th one sold. In 1930 Dell Publishing invited him to New York at an (at the time) incredible $500-a-month salary. He became a full-time staff writer there, pulling double duty on the publisher's dime magazines, "Scotland Yard" and "Sky Raiders".

In 1933 he left Dell for a challenging position with rival publishers Street and Smith. He was responsible for writing the lead novel for their new "Doc Savage Magazine" each month at $750 a pop. Dent wound up writing 150+ of these stories and embellished Savage with the brawny yet wildly multi-faceted persona (much like Dent himself) we recognize today. Dent turned Savage into a combination engineer-scientist-linguist-surgeon, leading his loyal crew into one outlandish adventure after another. Given complete creative control, Dent used his fertile imagination to bring the magazine's monthly circulation soaring to over 200,000. During the mid-'30s he found time to freelance a few pulp stories to other magazines, notably "Black Mask" (inventing an adventurer not unlike himself, Oscar Sail), drawn to that magazine by its charismatic editor Joe Shaw. Dent came up with more wild plots, action and thrills than any of his contemporaries.

Lester Dent died of a massive heart attack while on a treasure cruise in 1959--very likely the way he would have wanted to go.
- IMDb mini biography by: Jack Backstreet (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)