Born into poverty as an illegitimate child in London, Wallace left school at the age of 12. He joined the army at 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War, for Reuters and the Daily Mail. Struggling with debt, he left South Africa, returned to London and began writing thrillers to supplement his income, publishing books including The Four Just Men (1905). Drawing on his experience as a journalist in the Congo, covering atrocities in Belgium, Wallace published short stories in magazines such as The Windsor Magazine and later published collections such as Sanders of the River (1911). He signed with Hodder and Stoughton in 1921 and became an internationally renowned author.
Wallace was such a prolific writer that one of his publishers claimed that a quarter of all books in England were written by him. In addition to journalism, Wallace wrote screenplays, poetry, works of historical nonfiction, 18 plays, 957 short stories, and more than 170 novels, including 12 in 1929 alone. More than 160 films have been made on the work of Wallace. Besides the creation of King Kong, he is remembered as a writer of the "colonial imagination", for the detective novels of JG Reeder and for The Green Archer series. He has sold more than 50 million copies of his works combined in various editions, and The Economist describes him as "one of the most prolific thriller writers of the [20th] century."
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