author
William Wallace Cook
1867–1933
A fast, prolific storyteller of the dime-novel era, he wrote westerns, adventure tales, serials, and plays for a mass audience. He is also remembered for Plotto, a plot-generation guide that later became a curious classic for writers.
2 Audiobooks
The Fiction Factory Being the experience of a writer who, for twenty-two years, has kept a story-mill grinding successfully
by William Wallace Cook
Adrift in the Unknown; or, Queer Adventures in a Queer Realm
by William Wallace Cook
About the author
Born in Marshall, Michigan, William Wallace Cook was an American journalist and writer of popular fiction whose career stretched across westerns, adventure stories, dime novels, serials, and stage and screen work. Some of his writing appeared under the pen name John Milton Edwards.
Cook is often associated with the boom years of inexpensive popular fiction, especially the kind of energetic, cliffhanger-driven storytelling that filled story papers and dime novels. Reference collections from the New York Public Library describe him as a prolific author in these forms, and science-fiction reference sources also note his place in early speculative and adventure writing.
He is still remembered today not only for his fiction but for Plotto (1928), a guide designed to help writers generate story plots. That book gave him an unusual afterlife: long after the dime-novel market faded, Cook remained interesting to readers and writers curious about how popular stories are built.