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Harry Sinclair Drago (20 March 1887 – 25 October 1979) was an American writer of screenplays and novels. He was very prolific and published on averag three books per year, in addition to writing screenplays and short fiction. If you have never heard of him before, you may be more familiar with his work under various pseudonyms, some of which were Sinclair Drago, Grant Sinclair, Stewart Cross, Kirk Deming, Will Ermine, Peter Field, Bliss Lomax, and J. Wesley Putnam.

Drago was born in White Plains, New York. He held a number of jobs in the writing and publishing industry, including reporter and columnist for the Toledo Bee in Toledo, Ohio and Hollywood scriptwriter (1928-1933), but is best known for his historical western fiction, most of which was set in the American Southwest. His novels include Oh Suzanna, Whispering Sage, Out of the Silent North, Buckskin Affair, Fenced Off, and Decision at Broken Butte. His stories became the basis for episodes of the Cheyenne TV series, as well as such motion pictures as Whispering Sage, Where East is East, Cold Comrades. He one produced screenplay was for The King of the Kongo (1929)—which was quite a curiosity at the time. It was a movie serial, produced part silent and part “talkie,” as talking motion pictures came into vogue.

In his later years, he turned from historical fiction to writing nonfiction histories of the American West.

His work received many awards, among them the Buffalo Award for best western book of the year (1960) for Wild, Woolly, and Wicked, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame Award (1970) for The Great Range Wars, and the Western Heritage Award (1971).

—Karl Wurf

Rockville, Maryland