Kenneth Perkins

Kenneth Taylor Perkins was born on May 16, 1890, in Kodaikanal, India in the south Indian state of Madras (now known as Tamil Nadu), where his parents were posted as missionaries with the Madura Mission, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. His father, James Coffin Perkins, graduated from the University of California with the Class of 1874; he then received his LL.B degree from Columbia University in 1876 and graduated from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1885.

On June 28, 1885, James married Charlotte Jean Taylor in Baltimore, Maryland. They met when newly-ordained James was brought in as a substitute pastor at Faith Presbyterian Church, where Charlotte attended. Shortly after the wedding, they sailed for India. Their first children, twin girls, died at childbirth on May 3, 1886. Kenneth's older brother, Donald, was born in 1888. A third son, Malcolm, died at 18 months in June 1895. Following a brief illness, Charlotte died from hepatitis on January 19, 1898, in Tirumangalam.[1] Shortly thereafter, James' sister Mary R. Perkins sailed from San Francisco to India by herself to help him take care of the children.[2]

James married his second wife, Lucy Elizabeth Croswell, on March 24, 1904[3] and they had one son, James Croswell Perkins (1905-1980).[4]

Around the time of their father's remarriage, Kenneth and Donald, accompanied by their aunt, were sent to live in San Francisco, California, with their grandfather, Samuel Perkins, a wealthy shipping agent and "Argonaut," who arrived in San Francisco during the California Gold Rush on June 14, 1850, from Maine.[5][6] Their grandmother, Sarah Coffin Perkins, had died three years earlier on September 3, 1901. Kenneth was living with his grandfather at the time of the 1906 earthquake. Their house survived the temblor but was then dynamited to make the Van Ness firebreak. Samuel Perkins died shortly afterwards in the refugee camp in Belvedere on July 10, 1906.[7]

Kenneth's brother Donald Campbell Perkins died at age 24 on August 18, 1913, in the wreck of the S.S. State of California. He was the First Radio Operator and went down with his ship when the steamer, running at full speed, struck an uncharted rock in Gambier Bay, ninety miles south of Juneau, Alaska. When the vessel began to sink, he relieved his subordinate in order to send the SOS signal himself. Within the three minutes that it took for the ship to go down, Perkins got out his call for help several times. Out of 179 lives aboard, only 31 were lost. For his bravery and quick action, Donald C. Perkins' name is inscribed on the Wireless Operators Memorial in Battery Park, New York City.[8][9]

After graduating from Lowell High School in San Francisco in 1909, Kenneth Perkins spent some time as a steward on a Pacific steamer before entering the University of California as a member of the Class of 1914. As a student, Perkins was active in the English Club, where three plays that he wrote, "Beyond," "Blind Alleys," and "Bagdad," were produced and performed by the club. Another play, "A Full House," co-written with Norman Loyall McLaren and set in the "Nu Beta Sorority House" at Berkeley, was performed as part of the "Junior Farce and Curtain Raiser on Junior Day" in 1912. Through the club, Perkins met future writers Sidney Coe Howard and Frederick Schiller Faust. Howard would win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for his screenplay for Gone With the Wind, and Faust would go on to have a very successful career as the iconic Western writer Max Brand.

After graduation, Perkins stayed another year at Berkeley in order to earn a Master's degree in English in December 1915, with a thesis on symbolism in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. With degree in hand, he went to work in 1916 at Pomona College in Claremont, California, as an Assistant Instructor in English and Dramatics. He was hired along with Reginald Pole, a highly regarded English Shakespearean actor (and the father of Rupert Pole), who was put in charge of the college's dramatics program with Perkins as his assistant.[10] The American entry into World War I interrupted his academic career and Perkins enlisted in the United States Army in 1917 and served as a 2nd lieutenant in the field artillery. After the war, in summer 1919, Perkins taught a pair of courses (elementary and advanced) on the "motion picture scenario" for UC Extension in San Francisco.[11]

The Beloved Brute, 1923

Kenneth Perkins moved to New York in 1919 and rekindled his friendship with his old college pal, Frederick Schiller Faust, where they spent hours together talking about plots. Perkins aspired to become a writer and had a stack of unsold stories. Faust went over them, word by word, and encouraged him to stick with writing. His first story, "Gotham's Wife," which Faust had meticulously edited (as Perkins later recalled, "Heinie had gone over it, corrected it, twisted it, and cut out all the 'literary' touches"[12]) appeared in the July 31, 1920, issue of Argosy All-Story Weekly. After Faust gave him a copy of his first Max Brand novel, The Untamed (1919), Perkins was inspired to try his own hand at Westerns.[12] Faust championed Perkins to his editor at Munsey's, Robert H. Davis, who bought Perkins' first Western.[13] Perkins' career was launched. He spent the rest of his life as a full-time writer, often churning out stories at a breakneck pace. Multiple Perkins stories appeared every year in a variety of magazines. His last story, "Bronco Elephant," was published in Esquire in June 1951, the month of his death.

Although Perkins wrote stories in many genres, including mysteries and romantic adventure tales, he quickly realized that his particular talents lay with the Western story, particularly in tales of young cowboys and wild horses. From 1923 to 1942, he published thirty-four hardcover novels, under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms, all but five of which were Westerns.

For a few years in the mid-1930s, Perkins turned his hand to "weird tales," stories with elements of horror and the supernatural that were written specifically for the "shudder pulps," pulp magazines such as Horror Stories, Terror Tales, and Dime Mystery Magazine. For these he employed the pseudonym J.O. Quinliven, primarily to disguise the fact that he was writing these types of stories from his family.

Several of Perkins' stories and novels were adapted for stage and film. In 1923, a Tom Mix silent feature called Romance Land was adapted from Perkins' story, "The Gun-Fanner," which had appeared in four consecutive issues of Argosy All-Story Weekly in June-July 1922. His first hardcover novel, The Beloved Brute (1923) was adapted as a feature film the following year, and his second novel Ride Him, Cowboy (1923) was filmed twice. It first appeared as a silent feature in 1927 under the title The Unknown Cavalier, starring the popular trick rider and Western film star Ken Maynard. The second adaptation debuted in 1932 with a young John Wayne in the lead role. For the 1949 adventure film, Song of India, Perkins co-wrote the screenplay with Art Arthur. Other feature films adapted from Perkins' stories starred such Hollywood luminaries as Robert Young, Audie Murphy, Wayne Morris, Randolph Scott, Robert Ryan, and Barbara Stanwyck. Silent Western icons Maynard and Mix each starred in two films adapted from Perkins stories.

Perkins also had a brief flirtation with Broadway fame. His play Creoles, a comedy set in 1850 New Orleans, debuted in 1927 at the Klaw Theatre and ran for twenty-eight performances. A few years later another play, Dance With Your Gods, opened to less favorable reviews. However, this play is notable as the debut vehicle for actress Lena Horne. In 1947, Creoles was revived as a short-lived musical under the title Louisiana Lady.

Perkins found more success, albeit much of it posthumously, in contributing stories for radio and television scripts, including episodes of The Range Rider, The Gene Autry Show, Zane Grey Theatre, Maverick, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and others.

With the exception of the Quinliven tales, the vast majority of Kenneth Perkins' short stories and scripts were published under his real name. However, when it came to his novels, he employed a variety of pseudonyms, with titles appearing as by King Phillips (four novels), Kim Knight (five novels), Charles Dustin (three novels), and Randolph Hale (two novels).

The Charles Dustin name is the subject of a bibliographical mystery. Normally reliable reference sources, such as Contemporary Authors, have attributed the name as a pseudonym of John Ulrich Giesy (1877-1947).[14] Giesy was the author of humorous mysteries and science fiction stories in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein. These sources claim that Giesy published western novels as Charles Dustin. However, it can be proven that the Dustin novels were written by Kenneth Perkins. A three-part story called "Broncho Men" appeared in consecutive issues of Street & Smith's Western Story Magazine in October 1934 under Kenneth Perkins' byline. The hardcover novel, Bronco Men, published in 1940 as by Charles Dustin, is clearly an adaptation of a serialized story (despite the slight difference in the spelling of the title). Both stories start with a young man named Lem Beavers (described as being 20 years old, with a face that is "raw-boned, homely, and happy") traveling with his wife in a covered wagon on the Oregon Trail. In both tales, Beavers' wife dies in childbirth on the trail, attended to by a veterinarian and an Indian woman, leaving young Lem with a baby daughter to raise on his own. Clearly, both stories were written by the same person. The British edition of Bronco Men identifies an earlier Dustin title, Hardboiled Tenderfoot, as being by the same author. And, although circumstantial, all three of the Dustin novels were published by Dodge Publishing Company, which published several other Perkins novels (under his own name and other pseudonyms).

On Christmas Day in 1919, Kenneth Perkins was married to Grace Adelaide Bemis, whom he had met when she was a student of his at Pomona College, in the French Chapel of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. They had one daughter, Charlotte Joan, born in 1926 in New York, whom they named after his late mother, although she was known as Joan throughout her life.[15]

Perkins died in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 61 on June 7, 1951, after a five month stay at the Veterans Administration Hospital. Grace died exactly seventeen years later on June 7, 1968, at age 71. They are both buried at Rialto Park Cemetery in Rialto, California (San Bernardino County).

• Kenneth Perkins at IMDb
• Kenneth Perkins at the Internet Broadway Database
• Kenneth Perkins Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
• The FictionMags Index