Archives West Finding Aid

Author William Robert Cox was born on April 14, 1901 in Peapack, New Jersey. He was the eldest son of William and Marion Grace (Wenz) Cox. He grew up working for his father delivering ice and coal in Jersey City and Newark. In high school he turned to athletics and boxed, and played baseball, tennis and basketball. Later, he played football in New Jersey and Pennsylvania leagues, earning five dollars per game. According to a 1988 article in the Los Angeles Times, he wrote 80 novels, 1,000 short stories, 100 television scripts and screenplays.

His writing career began with feature writing for Sunday Call, a newspaper in Newark. Later, at age 21, he edited La Tribuna, a weekly Italian-American paper. Cox's first fiction story (on football) was published in 1934, in American Boy. He went on to write stories for detective, Western and sport pulp magazines, such as: Argosy, Blue Book, Dime Sports, Sports Novels, Detective Tales, Black Mask, and Dime Western. He wrote under at least seven pseudonyms: Willard d'Arcy, Mike Frederic, John Parkhill, Joel Reeve, Wayne Robbins, Roger G. Spellman and Jonas Ward. Sometime during the 1930s he moved to Florida and wrote for the pulp magazine industry for at least 14 years.

When these magazines slumped in the late 1940s, Mr. Cox took up writing television plays and some screenplays, including two motion picture films produced by Universal Studios in the 1950s: "The Veils of Baghdad" and "Tanganyika." In 1948 he moved to Sherman Oaks, California, in the San Fernando Valley to be closer to Hollywood. Mr. Cox lived there until his death. He wrote television scripts for shows such as "G.E. Theater," "Bonanza," "Outer Limits," "The Virginian" and many others. Mr. Cox began writing novels in 1954, most of which were Western fiction and juvenile sports fiction.

Mr. Cox was a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Western Writers of America (past committeeman, director, vice-president; and president, 1965-1966, 1971-1972). According to his widow, Casey Collins Cox, he was writing his 81st novel, Cemetery Jones and the Tombstone Wars on the day of his death, Sunday, August 7, 1988. He was 87. He was survived by his wife, Casey, and his stepson, Douglas Campbell. He was the "beloved husband of Midge, Lamar, Lee, Pat and Casey," according to an article in the Armchair Detective (Winter, 1989).

Sources: Los Angeles Times, Friday, August 12,1988; New York Times, Friday, August 12, 1988; Armchair Detective, winter 1989, Vol. 22, No. 1; and Gale Literary Data Bases: Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003.