The Pulps, The Adirondacks, and Coon Mountain Bill

A collection of stories by

William Merriam Rouse

(1884-1937)

With a biographical introduction by

Miriam DuBois Babcock

Printed in Canada, First Printing, April 28, 2006
George A Vanderburgh, Pub.,
The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box

ISBN 1-55246-689-2
Soft cover, 507 pages,

$30.00

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The Pulps, The Adirondacks and Coon Mountain Bill was published to memorialize one of the unsung authors of the age of pulp fiction, a lesser known but prolific free-lance writer, my step-father, William Merriam Rouse (1884-1937). ). During the first third of the century, pulp magazines were not considered literature (so scholars would not have looked at him). Today there are many who see this as a genre worth researching, a potentially serious contribution to real literature. Between World War I and World War II, the pulps became one of the dominant forces in popular culture. The stories took the reader back to a time of daring dreams, bold adventure and a simpler outlook on the world.

Bill Rouse wrote hundreds of short stories, novelettes, and serials of adventure, mystery, detective, humor, romance and horror as well as his favorite Colonial and Quebec stories for various pulp and "slick" magazines. I inherited sixty original unpublished manuscripts written by Bill Rouse, a stack of letters to and from his agents and top-brass pulp editors of the 1930's, and a few photographs. The first four chapters of this 507 page book cover his biography and include my memories of the personal man, his little foibles, his humor, work ethics and his attitudes about life that he shared with me. The book also has 26 of Bill's best unpublished manuscripts, four of his stories previously published, numerous pictures, and a comprehensive bibliography.

In his brief lifetime, Bill Rouse left a great legacy to the Adirondack region, especially the area between the Boquet River and Lake Champlain, known as his beloved Coon Mountain. He used this setting in many of his adventure stories, as well as his humorous yarns about the backwoods folks who populated the imaginary area he called "Bildad Road." In 1940, pulp editor F. Orlin Tremaine reprinted many of these stories in a hard cover volume entitled "Bildad Road." One of Bill's stories published in Collier's was used for a silent movie in 1918.

This book should be of great interest to those who have revived their fascination with the Great American Pulp Literature of the first third of the century as well as to those who revel in the folklore of the Adirondack Mountains of New York State.

by Miriam Dubois Babcock

About Miriam Dubois Babcock
Born in Rensselaer, New York,[1923], my childhood years were spent both there and in the Adirondacks at Coon Mountain near Westport. I later schooled in Kentucky, worked in a defense plant in Brooklyn during WWII; served under the Church of England as a missionary in northern Alberta, Canada; married, homesteaded and raised seven children in the wilds of northern Alberta; ranched in Wyoming; published a newspaper in Grande Cache, Alberta; worked in a bank in Florida; married my first love in Ontario, Canada; then moved back to Florida to enjoy the thunder and lightening. My most courageous project was started after I was 80--to write a biography of my step-father, William Merriam Rouse, (1884-1937) a prolific writer of pulp fiction for the first third of the century.
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