Norvell Wordsworth Page (July 6, 1904 – August 14, 1961) was an American pulp fiction writer, journalist and editor who later became a government intelligence worker. He is best known as the prolific writer of The Spider pulp magazine novels (1933–1943). Early life He was born in Virginia, the son of Charles Wordsworth Page (1880–1947) and Estlie Isabelle Bethel Page (1880–1946). The name Norvell came from his maternal grandmother Elvira Russell Norvell Page. Career Page spent 12 years as a newspaperman, doing many dirty jobs and seeing many corpses in the morgues. When he did start writing, it was western stories, a subject he knew nothing about, but they sold. Finally the editor who bought the stories suggested he write about something he knew, like gangsters. One of Page's earliest stories was a mystery story, "The Devil Muscles In", written for the November 1930 issue of Detective-Dragnet Magazine, as by N. Wooten Page. In October 1933, Popular Publications launched The Spider magazine, about the titular hero. Popular hoped The Spider would imitate the enormous success of Street & Smith's The Shadow. Page wrote a backup story in the first issue of The Spider pulp, "Murder Undercover", and by the third issue was writing the main Spider stories. This continued with great success till he seemed to have a nervous breakdown while writing "the Living Pharaoh" serial and took a nine-month break from writing before returning to writing relatively tame stories about G-Men (in Ace G-Man Stories) and detective stories. He is best known as the author of the majority of the adventures of that ruthless vigilante hero The Spider, which he and a handful of other writers wrote under the house name of Grant Stockbridge. He also contributed to other pulp series, including The Black Bat and The Phantom Detective, and supplied scripts for the radio programs based on the characters he wrote, science fiction and two early sword and sorcery fantasy novels under forms of his real name, Norvel Page and Norvell W. Page. His 1940 Unknown novel But Without Horns is considered an early classic explication of the superman theme. Under the pen name of N. Wooten Poge, Page wrote the adventures of Bill Carter for Spicy Detective Stories. His works only saw magazine publication during his lifetime, but his fantasies and some of the Spider novels were later reprinted as paperbacks. The Spider was a crime-fighter in