Arthur Preston Hankins

Arthur Preston Hankins was an American author remembered mainly for Western fiction. Library records list his lifespan as 1880–1932, and surviving catalogs show a steady run of novels in the 1920s, including The Jubilee Girl (1921), The She Boss (1922), The Heritage of the Hills (1922), Cole of Spyglass Mountain (1923), and The Range War on VV (1928).

A 1921 newspaper item from Riverside, California, reported that The Jubilee Girl was his first novel and said he had already spent more than eleven years publishing stories in well-known magazines. That helps explain the fast, plot-driven feel of his fiction: he seems to have come up through magazine storytelling before moving into full-length books.

Hankins also had ties to early film. Modern film databases credit him as a writer on silent-era projects such as The Avenging Arrow (1921), Fighting Fate (1921), and The Boss of Camp Four (1922). Several of his novels have been preserved by Project Gutenberg and other public-domain libraries, which has helped keep his work available for new readers long after his death.