Heroized caricatures of "Buffalo Bill" and "Arizona Frank" gushed from the prolific imagination of the "man who fictionalized the West"--Ned Buntline. Yet his own life was as bizarre and eventful as those he created in his "biographies." Buntline had achieved fame and a good measure of fortune as the author of a myriad of "dime novels," cheap paperbound adventure stories which bore such melodramatic titles as The Pirate King of the Floridas, The Doomed City of Sin, The Red Revenger, etc. The novels, published by such firms as Street & Smith and Beadle & Adams, appealed to a wide variety of soldiers, sailors and an army of ordinary workaday individuals.