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At twenty-six, author Walter Farley hit on a winning formula for juvenile fiction. "Farley's novels," wrote A. B. Emrys in the Journal of Popular Culture, "make the best of both romantic escapes and educational insider portraits of horse training and racing." Emrys further explained the "Farley formula": He "weaves the ingredients of boys' action adventure, Westerns and supernatural tales with realistic animal stories and self-help literature," each tale beginning with some exciting event and ending with a nail-biting race. This formula worked through twenty-one installments of stories about boys and a powerful black stallion, selling twelve-million copies in twenty languages worldwide from the outset of the series in 1941 to Farley's death in 1989. Add to this the several movies adapted from the books--one made well over a decade after Farley's death--and the result is a veritable cottage industry of fiction. "In the field of publishing, where 'phenomenal' authors appear with the regularity of the spring lilacs and the autumn asters (and disappear just as regularly), Walter Farley was a genuine phenomenon," claimed Christian Science Monitor contributor Richard Brunner.
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