Henry James O'Brien Bedford-Jones was a Canadian-American author of Westerns, adventure fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction. He was born on April 29, 1887, and died on May 6, 1949. In 1908, he became an adopted U.S. citizen. It was 1887 when Bedford-Jones was born in Napanee, Ontario, Canada. Growing up, his family went to the United States. As an adult, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. The author William Wallace Cook, Bedford-Jones' friend, told him to try writing, so he did. He started writing dime books and pulp magazine stories. Bedford-Jones wrote a huge amount. Pulp editor Harold Hersey once said that he met Bedford-Jones in Paris, where he was working on two books at the same time, with each story on its own typewriter. Bedford-Jones said that Alexandre Dumas was his main inspiration, and he wrote D'Artagnan (1928), a book that followed Dumas's The Three Musketeers. He was called "King of the Pulps" because he wrote so many short stories and books (800 in total). A number of pulp mags published his work. Bedford-Jones's main publisher was Blue Book magazine. His work also appeared in Adventure, All-Story Weekly, Argosy, Short Stories, Top-Notch Magazine, The Magic Carpet/Oriental Stories, Golden Fleece Historical Adventure, Ace-High Magazine, People's Story Magazine, Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine, Detective Fiction Weekly, Western Story Magazine, and Weird Tales.
