Frank Gruber

Frank Gruber may refer to:

See also

Frank Gruber (writer)

Frank Gruber (born February 2, 1904, Elmer, Minnesota, died December 9, 1969, Santa Monica, California) was an American writer, best known for his Westerns and detective stories. He sometimes wrote under the pen names Stephen Acre, Charles K. Boston and John K. Vedder.

Nine year old newsboy, Gruber read his first book, a paperback copy of Luke Walton, the Chicago Newsboy by Horation Alger, Jr. During the next seven years he read a hundred more Alger books and says they influenced him more than anything else in his life. They told how poor boys became rich but what they instilled in Gruber was an ambition at age nine or ten, to be an author. He had written his first book before eleven, using a pencil on wrapping paper.

Age 13 or 14, his ambition died for a while but several years later it rose again and he started submitting stories to various magazines, like Smart Set and Atlantic Monthly. Getting rejected, he lowered his sights to The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, with no more success. The pulps were getting noticed and Gruber tried those but with no success. As a story came back with a rejection slip, he would post it off again to someone else, so he could have as many as forty stories going back and forth at different times, costing him about a third of his earnings in postage. Earl Stanley Gardner called him the fighter who licked his weight in rejection slips.