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Erle Stanley Gardner, who also wrote under the pseudonyms of A. A. Fair, Carleton Kendrake and Charles J. Kenny, was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1889. From there the family emigrated to the West? first in Oregon, then the Klondike area, finally settling in a little town called Oroville. Mr. Gardner?s father was a mining engineer, and some of the mining knowledge Erle assimilated is reflected in some of the later novels.
Erle Stanley Gardner graduated from the Palo Alto High School in 1909? then located in the San Francisco Bay area. Mr. Gardner went on to Valparaiso University in Indiana, but was expelled for being in a fistfight. Working as a typist for a California law firm, Erle Stanley Gardner picked up information about the legal profession, and although he hadn?t formally read law, he passed the requirements and was admitted to the bar in 1911. Mr. Gardner then opened his own law office at the ripe age of twenty-one. It was not a success.
When he left his own office, he worked for a corporate attorney, I. W. Stewart located in Oxnard, California, where he defended Chinese clients from 1911 to 1918. Erle Stanley Gardner married Natalie Frances Talbert in 1921, and had one child by her. Mr. Gardner moved to Ventura, and after a stint as a salesman for the Consolidated Sales Company, he had a law firm along with a lawyer named Frank Orr. In the courtroom he exuded the same feelings of confidence and expectancy of success that he later attributed to his famous character, Perry Mason.
1920 saw Erle Stanley Gardner contributing to the pulps, and Mr. Gardner was a very successful writer even before he began writing entire books. E. S. Gardner wrote at least 144 short stories as well as 301 novelettes before turning to whole novels of mystery fiction. His very first Perry Mason mystery was published in 1933. Erle Stanley Gardner ended his marriage to Natalie in 1935, but although they lived apart after that and he continued to send her money, they never divorced. After her death Mr. Gardner married his private secretary, Agnes Jean Bethell in 1968.
Erle Stanley Gardner has had much of his work adapted to TV and the big screen as well. Mr. Gardner was the recipient of the Fact Crime Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Erle Stanley Gardner died on March 11, 1970.