He was an American adventurer and writer whose given name was Edward Zane Carroll Judson, but he wrote under the name Ned Buntline. In 1845, he founded Ned Buntline's Own, a sensational magazine in Nashville. After being lynched in 1846 for a murder, but secretly cut down alive and released, he went to New York City, where he resumed the magazine. In the 1850s he turned up in St. Louis as an organizer of the Know-Nothing movement. After 1846 Buntline wrote more than 400 novels which were forerunners of the dime novels.
And a little more detail:
Colonel E. Z. C. Judson was an imaginative, inventive man of restless energy; any man who wrote 300-400 books would have to be. Yet his most imaginative, creative invention seems to have been himself—Ned Buntline. Ned Buntline was a bundle of outrageous contradictions. He was a heavy drinker who gave temperance lecturers; a moral reformer who exposed gamblers, brothels, and sweat shops in his newspaper, Ned Buntline's Own while keeping a mistress in the type of "boarding house" he exposed, blackmailing those he met in gambling dens in exchange for keeping their names out of print and encouraging sweat shop conditions at the printer where his paper was produced. He was a conservationist who once shot a dog to prevent its owner from engaging in a form of hunting he disliked.
And one of those dime novels:
A Ned Buntline Dime Novel
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