Norvell Wordsworth Page (July 6, 1904 – August 14, 1961) was an American pulp fiction writer, journalist and editor who later became a government intelligence worker.
He is best known as the author of the majority of the adventures of that ruthless vigilante hero The Spider, which he and a handful of other writers wrote under the house name of Grant Stockbridge.
The Spider was a crime-fighter in the tradition of The Shadow, wanted by the law for executing his criminal antagonists, and prefigured later comic book superheroes like Batman.
One of these, involving an invasion of giant robots, was copied by an early Superman story and helped inspire the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
[2] The setting of Page's sword and sorcery novels is central Asia in the first century A.D., when the legendary Prester John supposedly established a Christian kingdom there.
In Page's conception, the man behind the legend was hard-bitten Mediterranean adventurer Hurricane John, or Wan Tengri, a hero in the mold of Robert E. Howard's Conan, though more humorous, verbose, and exaggeratedly omnicompetent as a warrior.