Farley began what became The Black Stallion in the early 1930s while he was still in high school. The completed manuscript describes extensive travel across the Indian Sea, the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean Sea, up the coast of Europe, and twice over the Atlantic Ocean. When the book first became available in 1941, the European continent had been embroiled in war for more than two years. Citizens of the U.S. watched the developments taking place overseas warily, having been drawn into World War I in a similar way less than 25 years before. While travel by ship, as Farley describes it, was not impossible, the overriding concern of any ocean-going vessel would have been military attack, a concern Farley never addresses.

That the political turbulence—the historical context—of the age does not appear in Farley’s story likely contributed to its popularity. Readers would have recognized that he was writing about an earlier time of relative peace, about a time when the nations of the world were emerging from the Great Depression. Readers escaped into this simple, triumphant story of a good kid engaging an exotic, mysterious power and embodying adventure and success.