John Walter Scott, Jr. (1907 – 1987) was born in Camden, New Jersey.

When he was 15 he left school and begin to work at the mill where his mother worked also. The mill operator offered free night school classes for various aspects of mill work, one of those was design at the La France Art Institute. In 1930 Scott finished his art training and started to persue a career in freelance illustrating.

To avoid misinterpretation and out of respect for the pulp artist ‘H.W Scott’ he worked under the name J.W Scott. His first published pulp cover appeared on the July 9, 1932 issue of Street & Smith’s Wild West Weekly.

He sold freelance pulp covers to various known publishers like Marvel Science Stories, Mystery Tales, Quick-Trigger Western, Uncanny Tales (and many more). By 1938 he joined an advertising agency and began to find work in slick magazines. (read more here).