The Mark of Zorro

Table of Contents

 

 

 

PENGUIN

CLASSICS

 

 

 

 

 

JOHNSTON McCULLEY was born in 1883 in Ottawa, Illinois, and worked as a newspaperman, mainly in New York, while freelancing as a writer of popular fiction for pulp magazines. In 1908, he moved to California and immersed himself in its history. Of his hundreds of stories and fifty novels, by far the most popular and enduring are the four novels and fifty-seven novellas and short stories about Zorro, the daring masked rider and dazzling swordsman who fights against tyranny and oppression in Spanish/Mexican California. McCulley's other novels include more costume adventures set in Zorro's California, a number of Westerns, and mysteries with such masked-avenger protagonists as the Green Ghost, the Thunderbolt, the Scarlet Scourge, and the Crimson Clown. He was so prolific that he published some of his fiction under pseudonyms, including George Drayne, Frederic Phelps, Harrington Strong, Raley Brian, and even Rowena Raley. He also wrote screenplays, mainly for low-budget Westerns. He lived long enough to see the Disney televised
Zorro
become a huge hit and died in November 1958.

ROBERT E. MORSBERGER, PH.D., University of Iowa, is professor emeritus of English at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He served for two years as a visiting professor at the University of Nigeria and was a seasonal ranger/ historian for eight summers with the National Park Service. His ten books include the first book-length study of James Thurber, two volumes on
American Screenwriters
that he coedited for the
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Swordplay on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage,
and
Commonsense Grammar and Style.
A Steinbeck specialist, he edited Steinbeck's screenplay
Viva Zapata!
for Viking Penguin and has published numerous articles, short stories, and reviews.

 

KATHARINE M. MORSBERGER, PH.D., University of California, Riverside, has served as director of publications at Pitzer College and has taught at California State University, San Bernardino. An eighteenth-century literature specialist, she has published articles on John Locke; Dryden's and Pope's translations of Chaucer; Laurence Sterne and Roland Barthes; and in collaboration with Robert E. Morsberger, a biography,
Lew Wallace: Militant Romantic.
Both Morsbergers have been fencers and are drama reviewers for the
Claremont Courier.

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books(South Africa)(Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
The Mark of Zorro
first published in the United States of America by Grosset & Dunlap 1924

This edition with an introduction by Robert E. Morsberger and Katharine M. Morsberger published in Penguin Books 2005

 

Introduction copyright © Robert E. Morsberger and Katharine M. Morsberger, 2005 All rights reserved

Originally published in issues of All-Story Weekly magazine.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

McCulley, Johnston, 1883-1958.

The mark of Zorro / Johnston McCulley ; with an mtroduction by Robert E.

Morsberger and Katharine M. Morsberger. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-101-00736-5

1. Zorro (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Aristocracy (Social class}-Fiction. 3. Spaniards—California—Fiction. 4. Vigilantes—Fiction. 5. California-Fiction, I. Morsberger, Robert Eustis, 1929- II. Morsberger, Katharine M. III. Title. PS3525.A17725M'.52—dc22 2005045903

Set in Sabon

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission
of
the publisher
is illegal and punishable by
law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

A black-clad rider, waving a sword, his cape billowing in the wind, his rearing black horse silhouetted against the night sky—Zorro rides again to bring justice to the oppressed, decade after decade, from silent to sound film to radio to television and onward to the Internet. Zorro first saw the light of day—or rather, the dark of night—in 1919 in a five-part serial entitled
The Curse
of
Capistrano,
published in the pulp magazine
All-Story Weekly.
The author, thirty-six-year-old Johnston McCulley, had been a newspaper reporter, a foreign correspondent, a reporter for the
Police Gazette,
a freelance writer of novels and short stories for the pulps, and, during World War I, a public affairs officer. When he created Zorro, he could have had no idea that he was creating a mythic hero, a legend that was to endure for the better part of a century. Printed on the cheap throwaway paper which gave them their name, inexpensive pulp magazines, with their melodramatic cover illustrations, lured readers of adventure—science fiction, crime, horror, and Westerns. Unless reprinted in book form, pulp magazine fiction had a very brief life, and even the books, usually cheap reprints like McCulley's novels, had a very short shelf life. Yet a number of respected authors got their start writing pulp fiction, and from their number emerged two iconic figures of the twentieth century—Tarzan and Zorro.
¹

Zorro was rescued from oblivion and set on the road to immortality by Douglas Fairbanks, who read the
All-Story Weekly
episodes of
The Curse of Capistrano
while en route to Europe on his honeymoon. Deciding to film it as his next movie, retitling it The Mark
of
Zorro, was a radical change for Fairbanks, who until then had made contemporary comedies, in which he frequently portrayed an athletic playboy. In 1920, Fairbanks virtually invented the swashbuckling film with
The Mark of Zorro
, transforming his career and setting him on the road to immortality along with Zorro.

Fairbanks made Zorro so popular that when McCulley's novel was finally published in hardcover in 1924, the author changed its title to
The Mark of Zorro
and dedicated it to “Douglas Fairbanks, the original Zorro of the screen.” McCulley went on to write a sequel, serialized as
The Further Adventures of Zorro,
“in which Douglas Fairbanks again plays the hero.” But instead, Fairbanks returned to Zorro in 1925 with Don Q, Son of Zorro, not based upon a McCulley novel but upon Kate and Hesketh Pritchard's novel
Don Q's Love Story.
Fairbanks made Don Q the son of Zorro, whose name is Don Cesar (when disguised in one episode, he calls himself Don Q) and adjusted the script to fit the Fairbanks persona. In the film, Fairbanks also plays the original Zorro, who comes to his son's rescue at the end.

It was a stroke either of genius or good luck for McCulley to use
zorro
, the Spanish word for fox. The word has a resonance that has made the name unforgettable and kept it alive for nearly a century. The word for fox in any other language lacks the zest and edge of
zorro.
As Isabel Allende observes, when Zorro fiction or films are translated into other languages, Zorro remains untranslated; he is always Zorro.
²
The idea of the clever fox goes back at least as far as Aesop's fables and the
Odyssey,
in which the sorceress Circe plans to turn the wily Odysseus into a fox. To outwit someone is to outfox him. In the opening episode of Disney's
Zorro,
when Bernardo warns his master not to openly take on the ruthless dictator Montasario, Don Diego responds, “when you cannot clothe yourself with the skin of a lion, put on that of the fox,” and thus comes up with the idea of Zorro. Sometimes, the masked hero is referred to as
Señor Zorro
but never as the Zorro; he has become simply and memorably Zorro. It is the sound rather than the meaning of zorro that gives it vitality. The right title is equally significant.
³
McCulley's first title The Curse of Capistrano is catchy but forgettable. It is also misleading, since none of the action takes place in Capistrano, which is a mission stop on the Camino Real, south of Los Angeles, in and around which the novel does take place. Fairbanks, with a sense of what would attract an audience, changed the title to
The Mark of Zorro,
by which it has been known ever since. All but one of the subsequent film adaptations as well as McCulley's later Zorro stories have Zorro in the title.