Powers, Paul S. (Paul Sylvester), 1905-1971

Author Paul S. Powers (a.k.a Ward Stevens) was born in Little River, Kansas in 1905. He moved to the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1920s, at which time he began his professional writing career. Powers was a successful Western pulp fiction writer and was published extensively in the 1920s and 1930s in Wild West Weekly magazine. He created the western characters Sonny Tabor and Kid Wolf. Powers also wrote science fiction and fantasy stories for Weird Tales magazine, and is the author of a western novel, Doc Dillahay, published by Macmillan in 1948.

Powers was married twice and had three children from his first marriage- sons John and Tom and daughter Pat. In later life, he worked at a used bookstore in Berkeley, California, where he specialized in books dealing with Western Americana. Powers died in Berkeley in 1971. Powers' autobiography, Pulp Writer- Twenty Years in the American Grub Street, was published in 2007.

From the guide to the Paul S. Powers Papers, 1870s-2007, (The Ohio State University. Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.)