author
Robert Welles Ritchie
1879–1942
An American journalist, novelist, and scenario writer who moved easily between magazine fiction and early screen storytelling. His work often leans toward adventure, frontier settings, and fast-moving popular storytelling.
2 Audiobooks
Inside the Lines
by Earl Derr Biggers, Robert Welles Ritchie
Dust of the Desert
by Robert Welles Ritchie
About the author
Born in Quincy, Illinois, in 1879, Robert Welles Ritchie built a varied writing career that included journalism, fiction, and work for the silent-era film world. Library and author-reference sources describe him as an American author, journalist, and scenario writer, and note that many of his short stories appeared in magazines such as Harper's.
He is also associated with novels including Trails to Two Moons and Dust of the Desert, which suggest the kind of action-driven, Western-leaning storytelling that helped define his reputation. Film databases additionally connect him with screen writing credits from the 1910s and 1920s, showing how comfortably he worked across both print and screen.
Ritchie died in Carmel, California, in 1942. Though he is not as widely remembered as some of his contemporaries, his career offers a neat snapshot of a time when writers could move between newspapers, magazines, popular novels, and early Hollywood.