Luke Short

Trumpets West! Luke Short

An Indian-fighting officer carries on, facing danger and risking disgrace...

Author Luke Short (born Frederick Dilley Glidden, 1908-1975) was born in Kewanee, Illinois. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for two and a half years and then transferred to the University of Missouri at Columbia to study journalism. Following graduation, he worked for a number of newspapers before becoming a trapper in Canada. He later moved to New Mexico to be an archeologist's assistant. After reading Western pulp magazines and trying to escape unemployment, he began to write Western fiction. He sold his first short story and novel in 1935 under the pen name of Luke Short (which was also the name of a famous gunslinger in the Old West, although it's unclear if he was aware of that when he assumed the pen name.) His apprenticeship in the pulps was comparatively brief. In 1938 he sold a short story, "The Warning," to Collier's and in 1941 he sold his novel Blood on the Moon (aka Gunman's Chance) to The Saturday Evening Post.