Captain Alan Douglas

Douglas, Alan, Captain is a byline attached to early twentieth-century boys' adventure fiction. Reliable details of his life are scarce: his nationality and dates of birth and death are unrecorded, and public information is limited. About ten works appear under this name, best known through the Hickory Ridge Boy Scouts series, including The Pathfinder, The Fast Nine, The Endurance Test and Woodcraft. Their plots revolve around scouting, camping, hiking and outdoor survival, stressing teamwork, grit and a boy's sense of responsibility. Such books carried forward the youth-reading fashion encouraged by the Boy Scout movement, notable for action and suspense and written in a plain, direct style. Some catalogues attribute these works to G. Harvey Ralphson, but this has not been authoritatively confirmed, so the authorship remains uncertain.