Hopalong Cassidy is a fictional cowboy hero created in 1904 by the author Clarence E. Mulford, who wrote a series of short stories and novels based on the character. Mulford portrayed the character as rude, dangerous, and rough-talking. He was shot in the leg during a gun fight which caused him to walk with a little "hop", hence the nickname. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the character became indelibly associated with actor William Boyd, who portrayed Cassidy first in a series of sixty-six films from 1935 to 1948, then in children-oriented radio and TV series, both of which lasted until 1952. Boyd's portrayal of Cassidy had little in common with the literary character, being instead a clean-cut, sarsaparilla-drinking hero who never shot first. The plots of the film, radio and TV series were generally not taken from Mulford's writings. At the peak of the character's popularity in the early 1950s, he spawned enormous amounts of merchandise, as well as a comic strip, additional novels by Louis L'Amour (writing as Tex Burns), and even a short-lived amusement park, "Hoppyland", in Venice, Los Angeles. In literature Clarence E. Mulford wrote the first Hopalong Cassidy short story in 1904 while living in Fryeburg, Maine. He wrote the first novel, Bar-20 (named after Cassidy's ranch) in 1906. He wrote 28 Hopalong Cassidy novels in all, with the last one, Hopalong Cassidy Serves a Writ, being published in 1941. Not all of these novels focused on the Cassidy character; some focused on other characters in and around Bar-20. In 1950, while the character was undergoing a surge in popularity, then-aspiring author Louis L'Amour was commissioned to write four additional Hopalong Cassidy novels, this time with a characterization matching William Boyd's portrayal, rather than Mulford's writings. L'Amour wrote the novels under the pseudonym Tex Burns. Although they were his first published novels, he was unhappy with the assignment, since he preferred the original character, and publicly denied authorship of the novels for the rest of his life. In 2005, author Susie Coffman published Follow Your Stars, new stories starring the character. In three of these stories, Coffman wrote the wife of actor William Boyd into the stories. Film history As portrayed on the screen, white-haired Bill "Hopalong" Cassidy was usually clad strikingly in black (including his hat, an exception to the Western film stereotype that only villains wore black hats). He was reserved and well