John Philip Falter - biographical article about the artist

John Philip Falter was a fine artist who did a few covers for the pulps, all western themed. He is better known for having done more than 100 covers for the Saturday Evening Post between 1943 and 1971.

His pulp covers (images taken from the FictionMags Index):

Western Story Magazine, November 7, 1931 cover by J.P. Falter

Western Story Magazine, December 5, 1931 cover by J.P. Falter

Action Stories, March 1932 cover by J.P. Falter

Action Novels, April 1932 cover by J.P. Falter

Action Novels, Aug/Sep 1932 cover by J.P. Falter

Street and Smith's Wild West Weekly, Aug 20. 1932 cover by J.P. Falter

An excellent biographical article on him can be found in the History Nebraska society's journal, titled "THE ILLUSTRATOR'S PENCIL: John Falter from Nebraska to the Saturday Evening Post" by Deb Arenz: https://history.nebraska.gov/sites/history.nebraska.gov/files/doc/publications/NH2012JFalter.pdf. The article (and perhaps the artist himself) get the date of his first cover wrong, I found two earlier Western Story covers from 1931 which, coincidentally, i had submitted to the FictionMags Index about a year ago.

But it has some great photos of the artist at work, including the models he used for his pulp covers. There's also an entire museum dedicated to him in Fall City, Nebraska. If you can't visit it, the next best thing is the video here:

Enjoy.