J. Allan Dunn

J. Allan Dunn (1872-1941) was an enormously prolific writer of pulp fiction, selling nearly 1000 stories of various lengths during a career than spanned 30 years. Born in London, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 21. An explorer by nature, Dunn lived for several years in Colorado and traveled all over the West. Later he moved to Honolulu and, while based there, toured the Pacific extensively. After five years in Hawaii he relocated to San Francisco, where he began writing in earnest and gravitated to adventure stories after becoming friendly with Jack London. The peripatetic Dunn moved to New York just before the First World War and became a frequent contributor to Street & Smith's pulp magazines, including Top-Notch, People's Magazine, Complete Story Magazine, and especially Wild West Weekly, for which he wrote approximately 470 yarns published under his own byline as well as the house names Emery Jackson and John B. Strong. (His stories also saw print under the names of Joseph Montague and Don Crosby.) Dunn's work regularly appeared in such prestigious rough-paper magazines as Argosy, Short Stories, and especially Adventure, for which he penned many pirate stories and South Seas tales. It was for the latter magazine that he wrote Barehanded Castaways, at the urging of editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman. Dunn served on the board of directors of the New York-based Explorers Club and died in 1941.