Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dismissal of Moby Dick. Stephen Crane finished The Red Badge of Courage in his place on 23rd Street. Nathanael West, author of The Day of the Locust worked as night manager in the Kenmore Hotel near by. He used to sneak pals of his into the hotel, including Dashiell Hammett, who was working on The Maltese Falcon at the time...
...DASHIELL HAMMETT: A LIFE...
...were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster ... I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could." It could have been the stuff of hard-boiled detective literature; instead it was the stuff of hard-boiled detective life: the life lived by Dashiell Hammett, creator of The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. A voracious reader of Henry James, before he switched to the school of hard knocks, Hammett wrote four novels in a single burst of creativity from 1927 to 1930. He found himself hailed by André Gide and André Malraux...
...spur him to write nor, according to this intriguing and detailed account by Novelist Diane Johnson (Lying Low), did it change his habits. Despite his proclaimed affection for Hellman, he continued to patronize ladies of the evening and once asked her to join in a threesome (she declined). Hammett admired Marxism more than the U.S. Communist Party but joined a celebrity cell where he indulged in what Budd Schulberg called "dialectical materialism by the pool." In 1951, long after most film radicals had fled the cause, he spent six months in prison for refusing to divulge names in a Communist...
...honor was another manifestation of the literary silence, posing as bravery, that lasted until his death of lung cancer in 1961. The act convinced no one, least of all his biographer. Johnson regards her subject without illusion. She knows that inspiration can arrive and vanish without cause and that Hammett's chief tragedy was in holding himself accountable for something beyond his gifts or character. Even so, as she sees it, he showed a streak of heroism, not in his work so much as in "the long blank years that prove the spirit." That kind of exit line...