Walter Brown Gibson (September 12, 1897 – December 6, 1985) was an American writer and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow. Gibson, under the pen-name Maxwell Grant, wrote "more than 300 novel-length" Shadow stories, writing up to "10,000 words a day" to satisfy public demand during the character's golden age in the 1930s and 1940s. He authored several novels in the Biff Brewster juvenile series of the 1960s. He was married to Litzka R. Gibson, also a writer, and the couple lived in New York state. Early life Walter Brown Gibson was born on September 12, 1897, in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Alfred Cornelius Gibson (1849–1931) and May Morrell Whidden Gibson (1863–1941). Gibson graduated from Colgate University in 1920 where he was a brother of Delta Kappa Epsilon, and began working "for newspapers in his native Philadelphia as a reporter and crossword-puzzle writer," specifically for The North American, and later The Evening Ledger. In 1923–1924, he provided illustrated single-page articles for Science and Invention magazine describing various tricks and puzzles. In 1928 Gibson was asked by Macfadden Publications to edit True Strange Stories; he did, for a time, identified as Walter Scofield, commuting back and forth to New York. In 1931, after submitting some crime stories for Detective Story Magazine, he was asked by publishers Street & Smith to produce the first print adventure of The Shadow, who at that stage was merely a voice, the mysterious narrator of the Street & Smith-sponsored Detective Stories radio drama. It was Gibson who created all the mythos and characterization of The Shadow, including his alter ego of wealthy playboy Lamont Cranston. The Shadow The popularity of the radio show's narrator inspired the show's sponsors (Street & Smith) to translate the character into print, and Gibson was duly asked to produce 75,000 words for the first quarterly issue of The Shadow pulp magazine. This first Shadow story was published on April 1, 1931, just nine months after the character's appearance on the airwaves. Six months later, The Shadow was headlining a new radio show, and his pulp adventures—written by Gibson under the house pseudonym Maxwell Grant—were going from strength to strength; launched as a quarterly publication, "within months, the magazine was on a twice-monthly schedule," causing Gibson to produce the equivalent of 24 novels per year. Described as a "compulsive writer," Gibson