Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Dashiell Hammett might be called the principal love of Hellman's busy love life. He is credited with inventing the hard-boiled detective with the dour, daring Continental Op of Red Harvest and Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon. A clear, forceful prose stylist, Hammett was also a loner, a womanizer and a drunk. He had none of Hellman's worldly ambition, and he tailored his behavior to no one. Needless to say, she was crazy about...
Joan Mellen's good idea was to do a double biography of both, Hellman and Hammett (HarperCollins; 572 pages). They were colorful, talented, careless people who lived hard, fought with abandon and traveled impetuously, seeking out their gifted contemporaries in an American movable feast. Both believed that sexual freedom was a natural right. Their passions, personal and professional, could be an opportunity to examine American cultural history from the 1930s to the 1970s--the life of the left and of the theater, which were often related. The trouble is that Mellen's interest in that fascinating world is only perfunctory...
...rest of her talents did not come together so readily. Hammett was crucial to her success. When she began writing plays, he typed them (in those days she was a $15-a-week manuscript reader; he was a famous author). He slaved over her first hit, The Children's Hour, giving her the plot, goading her to sharpen the language and making her exaggerated gambits more realistic. Meanwhile, his own fiction was languishing; weakened by drink and pulmonary disease, he published only one book, The Thin Man, after he met Hellman...
...living in Vancouver. Gibson's NEUROMANCER, the first novel to win SF's triple crown -- the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards -- quickly became a cyberpunk classic, attracting an audience beyond the world of SF. Critics were intrigued by a dense, technopoetic prose style that invites comparisons to Hammett, Burroughs and Pynchon. Computer-literate readers were drawn by Gibson's nightmarish depictions of an imaginary world disturbingly similar to the one they inhabit...
...Kirk Hammett (Metallica's lead guitarist) has been really cool to us. He's sort of protective of us, he always calls and asks "Have you guys seen any money yet? Who's your accountant? Let me give you some numbers of some really good people." So he's been kind of keeping an eye on us. They got ripped off a lot in the beginning, and they've been doing it for ten years now, so he's seen a lot and wants to make sure other bands don't get screwed over...