[1] He graduated from Stanford in 1920[1][2] and went to work for the United Press news agency, first in New York, then around 1921, as a bureau chief in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
[3] He also wrote a number of historical non-fiction works, including a four-volume series on the American frontier experience.
[7] Along with Marc Connelly and John Lee Mahin, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Captains Courageous (1937).
[1][8] They had two children before "an interlocutory judgment of divorce was entered in the Superior Court of the State of California" in July 1935.
[9] According to his daughter, author Joan Van Every Frost, and as reported by historian Tony Burton, he married twice more: Florence Mason (1896-1969) sometime before 1940, and Frances Robinson Hess near the end of his life.