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Edward Yarde Breese was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1912. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1934. After graduating from Princeton, he worked for a time as a wire service reporter in New York covering financial news from the New York Stock Exchange. Later he served in the Army Air Force as an aerial gunner during the Second World War. .
After the war, he held a variety of positions including work as a personnel management and training executive; industrial management consultant; in sales and sales management; as a real estate broker in Florida; and teacher of economics, humanities, and industrial management at Georgia Tech and at the University of Georgia at Atlanta. .
He began a free-lance writing career sometime past the age of 40, at first concentrating on non-fiction articles for a variety of periodicals such as Manage, Fate, Armenian Salesman, Modern Man, The Freeman, Guns and Ammo, and American Rifleman. Beginning around 1966, he began to sell short pieces of fiction to such "pulp" magazines as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and Zane Grey Western Magazine. A number of his works were submitted under a variety of pseudonyms such as Brett Halliday, Zane Grey, Ned or Edward Buller, or simply as "Y. B.".
Breese died in Miami, Florida in 1979 at the age of 67.
Additional Breese material can be found in the Leo Margulies Papers (Coll 133).
The Edward Breese Papers document Breese's career as a popular fiction writer and consist of autobiographical sketches, correspondence, manuscripts, and financial material.
The correspondence, 1965-1972, is arranged chronologically and is for the most part between Breese and his various editors. There are also some personal family letters.
The manuscript section contains published and unpublished poetry, non fiction, and fiction ranging in size from short, article length (approximately 1,000 words) to novelettes (20,000-30,000 words). Short notes containing character sketches and plot devices are also included. The non-fiction pieces are mainly business articles and political opinion.
The fictional works include mystery, western, and romance stories. The section containing financial material contains short handwritten notes written by Breese which list titles of periodicals to which he proposed to sell articles and include the article titles, dates of sale, and amounts paid. Contracts mailed to Breese by various publishers are also included in the financial materials section.
The collection includes two photos, one of Breese and his wife attending a wedding, c. 1960, and a snapshot of them in later years.