Frederick Nolan

Who is Frederick Nolan?

Frederick William Nolan is an English editor and writer, mostly known as Frederick Nolan, but also using the pen names Donald Severn, Daniel Rockfern, Christine McGuire and Frederick H. Christian.

He was educated in Liverpool and Aberaeron, Wales. At the age of twenty one, he began the researches that established him as one of England's leading authorities on the American West. In 1954 he was co-founder of The English Westerners' Society.

At the start of his career, he became first a reader, and later an editor, for Corgi Books in London. The move to London in the early Sixties made it possible for him to pursue the other consuming interest of his life: the American musical theatre. During this time, he also began writing western fiction as Frederick H. Christian, a pseudonym derived from his own, his wife Heidi's, and his oldest son's first names.

Over the next decade, while working in publishing - with Transworld, then Penguin, Collins, and Granada in London, and later with Ballantine and Warner in New York, he produced fourteen westerns as well as a considerable body of journalism.

On July 4, 1973, Nolan made his own "declaration of independence", quit his job as a highly paid publishing executive and signed a contract to write eight full length novels in a year. The first of these was the hugely successful The Oshawa Project which was later filmed by MGM as Brass Target, starring Sophia Loren, John Cassavetes, Robert Vaughn, George Kennedy, Patrick McGoohan and Max von Sydow. Since that time he has completed over seventy books, not to mention as many biographical studies and articles for historical journals.