Norman in the late 1930's
By 1937 the Great Depression had forced Pat's Body shop out of business.
Unemployed and with a wife to support, Norman made a gutsy decision.
He decided to see if he could making a living by writing full time.
Norman began working on short stories in late 1937, and By the end of that
year he had sold four stories that were published in 1938. Norman had
an erudite writing style that combined his knowledge of the Old West
with authentic dialog from the period. He often set stories on the
periphery of actual historical events.
Norman kept detailed notes about his sales and so it was
possible to track his writing income year over year. Statistics show that the
median U.S. household income in 1940 was around $1200 per year. Norman passed that figure his
second year as a full time writer and never looked back.
Here is a summary of Norman's income for his first five years as a writer. The third
column lists Norman's income adjusted for inflation in 2010 dollars:
| Year | Income | 2010 Income | |
| 1937 | $148 | $2,282 | |
| 1938 | $664 | $9,957 | |
| 1939 | $1,292 | $19,929 | |
| 1940 | $1,301 | $20,067 | |
| 1941 | $1,818 | $27,843 |
Norman confined himself strictly to Western fiction and avoided the pulp
elements of the genre. In 1939, however, he could not resist making a wager
with a writer friend, rumored to be fellow Montana author Dan Cushman. The
bet was to see who could get the most lurid, sensationalistic and exploitive story
published. Norman won the bet with a story called
"Mate of the Demon" that was published in Detective Magazine. It was
considered by Norman to be the only non-Western story he ever published.
