Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett (May 27th 1894 with Baltimore, Maryland - January 10th 1961 with New York) is a American writer considered as the founder of the Roman black. Its contribution to the American literature is of an major importance, and its influence on authors such as Hemingway, Chandler or Simenon was recognized by each one of them.

Biography

Born in a poor family, Dashiell Hammett passes its youth to Philadelphia where, after several odd jobs, he becomes private detective during six years with famous the Agence Pinkerton, from there its inspiration for the whodunnit.

The term Roman black will be invented only after 1944 by the French intellectuals. When Hammett meets success in its country, one makes of it the inventor of the “ Hardware-boiled School ” (which one can translate by the “school of hard to cook”), in reference to the characters violent ones and apparently deprived of sensitivity which swarm in its stories. In France of the interval wars, it is encensé by André Gide and is published by the Gallimard editions, among the American great authors because the Black series does not exist yet.

At the beginning of the Years 1920, it revolutionizes the novel by its dry writing, visual, and of the stories in which the concepts of good and evil do not have short any more. The prototypes of the characters of the Roman black appear as of the red Harvest: anonymous detective (Continental Op'), vamp fixed on his drug addict of promised in marriage, tycoon of industry corrupted and accessory to the Maffia which helps it to break the strikes… Later its detective will take the name of Sam Spade, immortalized with the screen by Humphrey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon of John Huston.

Its first news appear in 1922 in collections of novels popular called “Pulp” (for “pulp”, name given to the bad impregnated paper of pieces of wood on which these works were printed), then come the red Harvest , the Maltese Falcon and the Key of glass , whose film adaptations will be success. The publication of the red Harvest is an event, because it is the first novel of the kind published with the the United States.

Like Agatha Christie, it gives place to an not-official justice. Its short career of writer finishes in 1934.

The second part of the life of Dashiell Hammett is dominated by alcohol and the harassing whose it is the object during the Chasse for the Witches maccarthyste. Shown Communism, movement for which it forever hidden its sympathy, it is sent in prison. Its works are withdrawn from the public libraries at this period and will never find their place there.

Alcoholic and patient of the Tuberculosis, Dashiell Hammett dies in New York in 1961.

Random links: