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Doc Savage is a fictional character, one of the most enduring pulp heroes of the 1930s and 1940s.
The character was created Street and Smith executive Henry Ralston and editor John Nanovic, but fully realized by Lester Dent, who wrote most of the 190 short novels in the series, which originally ran from 1933 to 1949, published by Street and Smith Publications and now owned by Condé Nast Publications. The "house name" of the author was Kenneth Robeson. The final eight novels were written in the early 1990s by novelist Will Murray and published under the house name.
Doc Savage, who is really Doctor Clark Savage, Jr., also known as "the Man of Bronze", is a surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, and explorer. His father trained his mind and body to near-superhuman abilities almost from birth, giving him great strength and endurance, a photographic memory, many fighting skills, and vast knowledge of the sciences. "He rights wrongs and punishes evildoers."
He resides on the top floor of a New York city skyscraper, implicitly the Empire State Building, and owns a fleet of cars, trucks, aircraft, and boats. He sometimes retreats to the Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. All of this is paid for with gold from a Central American mine the natives gave his father and his father left to him.
Some of the gadgets described in the series became reality, including telephone answering machines and hand-held automatic weapons.
Dent based the look of Doc Savage on the film actor Clark Gable. His height and weight varied with most of the books listing his height as 6' 6". Reprint book covers by illustrator James Bama depict Doc as a muscular man with bronze skin and a crew cut with a widow's peak, often wearing a brown leather vest and partially ripped shirt. Bama based his version of Doc on model/actor Steve Holland.
Doc's companions in his adventures (the "Fabulous Five") are:
Doc's cousin Patricia "Pat" Savage also joins Savage for a few aventures.
Doc's greatest foe, and the only one to appear in more than one book, was the Russian-born John Sunlight. Early villians were bent of ruling the world, but a late change in format had Savage operating more as a private investigator breaking up smaller crime rings.
In early stories some of the criminals captured by Doc received "a delicate brain operation" to cure their criminal tendencies. The criminals returned to society fully productive and unaware of their ctiminal past. A non-canonical comic book series published in the 1980s states these were actually lobotomies.
Dent, the series' creator and author, had a mixed regard for his own creations. Though usually protective of his creations he could be derisive of his pulp output. In interviews, he stated that he harbored no illusions of being a high-quality author of literature; for him, the Doc Savage series was simply a job, a way to earn a living by "churning out reams and reams of sellable crap."
Many of the stories were republished in paperback books in the 1960s through 1990s. The first 99 as single volumes then as double volumes (with two of the numbered stories in each book). Finally the original novels were finished in thirteen "omnibus" volumes of four or more stories each (in a numbered series). It is one of the few pulp series to be completly reprinted in paperback form. There is an active market for used Doc Savage reprints in all formats, on eBay and elsewhere. There are also dozens of fan pages and discussion groups on the Internet.
A camp Doc Savage movie was made in 1975, starring Ron Ely. It was the last film directed by George Pal.
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