His first love was magic, a passion he pursued all his life. He became an acknowledged master magician and remains a legend to legions of his fellow performers.

But Walter B. Gibson led a shadowy existence in other realms. He was a writer, first and foremost. For years in the 1930s and ’40s, he wrote two full-length novels a month. As his career progressed, he wrote hundreds of radio scripts for the character he created, a dashing playboy by day who became a mysterious justice-seeking vigilante by night.

If you guessed his creation was Batman, you’d be wrong. Batman came later. Gibson’s wildly popular creation was known as The Shadow, a crime-busting enemy of evil-doers like Shiwan Khan, The Wasp and The Cobra. Everywhere you went in Depression-ravaged America, you could read The Shadow’s exploits in the pulp fiction of the day, in comic books and even in daily comic strips.

But most of all you could hear his exploits in what was then the country’s most popular medium: radio.

Millions of people used to gather ‘round the family Victrola and thrill to the sound of an uncredited Orson Welles intoning these words ...

Gibson was born in Germantown, Pa. in 1897. Even as a high school student his love and knowledge of magic got him published in magazines and books about the mystical arts.

After graduating from Colgate University in 1930, he hit the road for New York City, where he landed a job as a newspaper reporter while continuing his freelance work.

A less ambitious man might have settled for the life of a big-city newspaperman. But Gibson was nothing if not energetic — and lucky. According to an undated interview in Colgate Magazine, he pitched an idea to publishers about a mysterious avenger with seemingly magical powers, capable of striking fear into the craven hearts of evil geniuses everywhere, men and women who never seemed to understand that crime doesn’t pay.

But Gibson, writing under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant, never seemed to tire of hammering home that message. And I mean hammering. As he told the magazine:

“The typewriter keys would fly so fast that I wondered if my fingers could keep up with them,” he said. Gibson credited his dexterity to his knack for sleight-of-hand and card tricks. Still, “at the finish of the story, I often had to take a few days off as my fingertips were too sore to begin work on the next book.”

Gibson wrote 283 Shadow novels over the course of a long life. His method was simple. All he did was produce between 10,000 and 15,000 words a day. Working at that pace, he was able to turn in two novels a month over 15 years. He also claimed — and no one disputed him — to have written 187 additional non-fiction books, mostly about magic. He published 668 newspaper and magazine articles, 48 syndicated feature columns, 394 comic books and, in whatever spare time he could find, invented many magic tricks professional magicians use to this day.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Gibson estimated he’d written 29 million words over his lifetime.

In 1977, at age 80, he told critic Kenneth Turan he kept 11 typewriters going at a time.

"I move from one to another."

In those later years, Gibson and his wife and fellow writer and magician Litzka R. Gibson lived in a 23-room house in Eddyville. Three of those rooms were libraries. He told the Washington Post, “I’ve got a room for Shadow stuff, a room for true-crime stuff, a room for magic.”

The final tally came to about 30,000 books. And though it seems possible, he didn’t write them all.

Walter B Gibson died on Dec. 6, 1985. He’s buried in Montrepose Cemetery.