[2] Other notable adult books by Kelland include Conflict (1920), Rhoda Fair (1925), Hard Money (1930), Arizona (1939), and Dangerous Angel (1953).
[5] Still, Kelland's name lives on in the dozens of motion pictures adapted from his works,[6] including Speak Easily (1932) starring Buster Keaton.
After completing two years of high school, he took a job in a chair factory, studying law at night.
[9] Kelland married Betty Caroline Smith in 1907, and at the urging of his father-in-law, left the newspaper business and moved to Vermont for a short period to run a clothespin mill with his brother.
From the mid-'20s forward, Kelland served as the toastmaster at the weekly luncheons of New York's Dutch Treat Club.
Author Hendrik Willem Van Loon resigned from the Club to protest this "disparaging" remark.
[9] According to historian David Leighton, best-selling author Clarence Budington Kelland first came to Arizona in 1936, while doing research on trailer life for a magazine serial entitled “Fugitive Father,” later published in the Saturday Evening Post.
He planned to stay one night in Phoenix, Arizona but two weeks passed before he departed for home in New York City, in the meantime he fell in love with the Valley of the Sun.
By the following year, he was researching Arizona history for a three-novel series in which the first one took place during the U.S. Civil War which mostly occurred in Tucson.
By December 1938, the galley proofs were finalized of what would be a magazine serial and then the novel Arizona — about a female pioneer, Phoebe Titus, in Tucson during the U.S. Civil War and her fight to bring an untamed territory to its knees.
At that time, Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, read the proofs and purchased the movie rights.