Norvell Wordsworth Page was an American pulp fiction writer, journalist and editor who later became a government intelligence worker. He is best known as the prolific writer of The Spider pulp magazine novels. He was born in Virginia, the son of Charles Wordsworth Page and Estlie Isabelle Bethel Page. The name Norvell came from his maternal grandmother Elvira Russell Norvell Page.
Career
Page spent 12 years as a newspaper man, doing many dirty jobs and seeing many corpses in the morgues. When he did start writing, it was western stories, a subject he knew nothing about, but they sold. Finally the editor who bought the stories suggested he write about something he knows, like gangsters. He wrote a backup story in the first issue of The Spider pulp: "Murder Undercover" and by the third issue was writing the main Spider stories. This continued with great success till he seemed to have a nervous breakdown while writing the Living Pharaoh serial and took a nine-month break from writing before returning to writing relatively tame stories about G-Men and detective stories. He is best known as the author of the majority of the adventures of that ruthless vigilante hero The Spider, which he and a handful of other writers wrote under the house name of Grant Stockbridge. He also contributed to other pulp series, including The Black Bat and The Phantom Detective, and supplied scripts for the radio programs based on the characters he wrote, science fiction and two early sword and sorceryfantasy novels under forms of his real name, Norvel Page and Norvell W. Page. His 1940 Unknown novel, But Without Horns is considered an early classic explication of the superman theme. Under the pen name of N. Wooten Poge, Page wrote the adventures of Bill Carter for Spicy Detective Stories. His works only saw magazine publication during his lifetime, but his fantasies and some of the Spider novels were later reprinted as paperbacks. The Spider was a crime-fighter in the tradition of The Shadow, wanted by the law for executing his criminal antagonists, and prefigured later comic booksuperheroes like Batman. Page's innovations to the series included a hideous disguise for the hero and a succession of super-scientific menaces for him to combat. One of these, involving an invasion of giant robots, was copied by an early Superman story and helped inspire the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The setting of Page's sword and sorcery novels is central Asia in the first century A.D., when the legendary Prester John supposedly established a Christian kingdom there. In Page's conception, the man behind the legend was hard-bitten Mediterranean adventurer Hurricane John, or Wan Tengri, a hero in the mold of Robert E. Howard's Conan, though more humorous, verbose, and exaggeratedly omnicompetent as a warrior. He comes close to taking over two cities in the course of his travels, but the series concludes before he establishes his empire. He was featured two stories Flame Winds and Sons of the Bear God. The magic John encounters is unconvincingly rationalized.
