Jack Warren

Paul Hugo Little (1915–1987) was an American pulp fiction writer and author of the historical novels forming the Windhaven series and The Hawk and the Dove series. Paul Little, acclaimed as perhaps this country`s most prolific writer, produced more than 700 romantic, historic and pornographic novels published under a number of different pen names.
The Guinness Book of World Records lists a South African woman, Kathleen Lindsay, as the most prolific writer with 904 novels. Mr. Little believed he was second, averaging a novel every week and a half since 1963.

''He was a very unusual man,'' said Helen Deer, a friend. ''You might say he was an eccentric. He could go from being very much a gentleman to cussing people out on the street. He was always gracious with my husband and myself. He struggled for years before he made it. He was in his 40s before he became recognized as a writer. And that is all he ever wanted to be, a writer. He and his late wife never had children because they didn`t feel they could afford them. He did not own a car. He lived in Hyde Park in those days and delivered his tapes by bike to a transcriber in the Loop.''
Mr. Little, an expert in chess and fluent in French, also wrote a book, ''Chessworks,'' on moves in the game and worked for many years as a professional translator from French to English. He also taught fiction in the City Colleges of Chicago. Among his other jobs before becoming a full-time writer were ad salesman, Montgomery Ward & Co. copy writer, radio announcer, music critic and food and wine writer.

He was the author of such popular historical novels as the Windhaven series, under the pen name of Marie de Journlet; the Hawk and the Dove series, using the name Leigh Franklin James; and of books in the Silverbell Romance series. Paula Minton, Kenneth Harding and Sylvia Sharon also have been his pseudonyms.

Mr. Little wrote only a couple of books under his own name. One of them was ''Condominium Trap,'' published by the University of Alabama Press.

He was the author also of a plethora of sexually explicit novels.

''Sure, call me a hack writer,'' he told a Tribune reporter in 1976. ''It doesn`t bother me.''

Still, he tried not to be a hack.
''Even when I have to do a hack job,'' he said, ''I try to get meaning into at least two of the characters. I try to get feeling and life into them and that, obviously, makes them much more vivid.''
*Chicago Tribune 23 June 1987