Johnston McCulley

Johnston McCulley is the pulp-era storyteller best known for creating Zorro in The Curse of Capistrano, later widely retitled The Mark of Zorro. His fiction often moves fast, with masked heroes, secret identities, crime, and lively adventure. Johnston McCulley wrote across multiple popular genres, but he is most remembered for the swashbuckling energy and clean storytelling that made Zorro a lasting icon in pulp adventure fiction for generations. Readers come to him for classic action, melodrama, and the origins of one of fiction's most recognizable vigilantes.