author
Michael J. Phillips
1876–1932
A pulp-era American writer and soldier, he moved easily between frontier action and early speculative adventure. His stories range from rough Western showdowns to future-war fiction, with a brisk, magazine-ready style that still feels lively.
1 Audiobook
Gun play
by Michael J. Phillips
About the author
Born in Owosso, Michigan, Michael J. Phillips was an American author and military man active in the early 20th century. Reliable reference sources describe him as a soldier, editor, and fiction writer who contributed to magazines from the early 1900s into the 1920s.
He wrote in more than one popular vein. Some of his work belongs to Western fiction, including Gun Play, while science-fiction reference sources also remember him for In Our Country's Service (1909), an early future-war novel. He also wrote nonfiction with a strong storytelling flavor, including Mark Twain's Partner, a 1920 piece for The Saturday Evening Post about the young Samuel Clemens in the West.
The surviving record around his birth year is not perfectly consistent, with some sources giving 1876 and others 1879. What is clear is that he died in 1932 and left behind a varied body of magazine and book work that reflects the tastes of American popular reading in his day.