Donald Grayson

Donald Grayson was one of the pen names used by William Wallace Cook (April 11, 1867 – July 20, 1933), an American journalist and hugely productive writer of popular fiction. Cook wrote westerns, adventure stories, dime novels, serials, and stage and screen material, building a career around lively storytelling and sheer speed.

Under the Donald Grayson name, he published adventure fiction including the Bob Steele books, now preserved in catalogs such as Project Gutenberg and The Online Books Page. Those stories reflect the kind of energetic, technology-tinged entertainment that helped define mass-market fiction in the early 1900s.

Cook is also remembered beyond his fiction for his practical books on writing, especially Plotto and The Fiction Factory, which influenced later generations of storytellers. Even when a title appeared under a pen name like Donald Grayson, it belonged to the wide-ranging output of a writer who helped shape early American pulp and serial fiction.