Walter Farley

Who was Walter Farley?

Walter Farley was the son of Walter Patrick Farley and Isabelle "Belle" L. Farley. He was an American author, primarily of horse stories for children. Educated at Columbia, where he received a B.A. in 1941, his first and most famous work was The Black Stallion. He wrote many sequels, and the series has been continued since his death by his son Steven.

Farley's uncle was a professional horseman and taught him various methods of horse training and about the advantages or disadvantages of each method. Mr. Farley began to write The Black Stallion while he was a student at Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School and Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. He finished it and had it published in 1941 while still an undergraduate at Columbia University.

Farley and his wife, Rosemary, had four children—Pam, Alice, Steven and Tim—whom they raised on a farm in Pennsylvania and in a beach house in Florida. In 1989 Farley was honored by his hometown library in Venice, Florida, which established the Walter Farley Literary Landmark in its children's wing. Farley died of cancer in October 1989, shortly before the publication of The Young Black Stallion, the twenty-first book in the Black Stallion series and after the start of production on the television series Adventures of the Black Stallion.