Walt Coburn

Walter John Coburn (October 23, 1889 – May 1971) was an American writer of Westerns. Coburn was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana Territory, the son of Robert Coburn Senior, the founder of the noted Circle C Ranch located south of Malta. The actress Dorothy Coburn is his niece.

Coburn served in the Army aviation corps during the World War I era. He later spent time as a cowboy and a surveyor, before becoming a full-time writer in the 1920s.

Western author Coburn began his career with Western stories in general fiction pulp magazines such as Adventure and Argosy. Later Coburn moved on to pulps specializing in Westerns, including Western Story Magazine, Lariat Story Magazine, Ace-High Western and Frontier Stories. He often wrote for the Fiction House pulp magazines, which promoted Coburn as "the Cowboy Author".

Coburn was enormously prolific; Flanagan states Coburn wrote almost two million words of fiction over a thirty year period. He was so popular that eventually, two pulp magazines - Walt Coburn’s Western Magazine and Walt Coburn’s Action Novels were issued, consisting mainly of reprints of Coburn's work.

After the pulps ended in the 1950s, Coburn switched his focus to writing paperback originals.

Coburn was a devout Christian. Coburn claimed, in his posthumously published autobiography Western Word Wrangler (1973) that God had chosen him to spread the Christian message through his fiction.

Coburn committed suicide at age 82 in Prescott, Arizona.