Happy Birthday, Doc Savage

     Or so Kenneth Robeson wrote: "An old notebook...entry: 'This thing started November 12, 1932.'"

     That gets a little complicated, given that "Robeson" never existed.  He was a house name at pulp publishers Street & Smith.  Lester Dent, who came close to being a Doc Savage character in real life,* wrote most of the stories. Dent, publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L. Nanovic came up with the character, his backstory and his associates, and presumably one of them made the actual notebook entry.

     Doc went on to hundreds of pulp-magazine adventures, a string of paperback reprints a generation later (when I found them), fan stories, new stories, incorporation into Philip Joe Farmer's "Wold Newton" family tree of fictional heroes, villains and superheroes, even more reprints and a remarkably awful George Pal film.

     And he may have had a real-world antecedent: Colonel Richard Henry Savage -- 19th-Century U. S. military officer, adventurer, world traveler and author of popular adventure and mystery novels. Or perhaps he was the model for Doc's father, Clark Savage, Sr. 
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* Originally a telegrapher, he went on to become a private pilot, ham radio operator, amateur sailor on the high seas with his own boat, world traveler, pioneer of commercial aerial photography and inveterate gadgeteer.  Among other things.