Dashiell Hammett

At 66 years old, Dashiell Hammett physical status not available right now. We will update Dashiell Hammett's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American writer of hard-boiled detective books and short stories.

He was also a screenwriter and a social activist.

Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse) are among the enduring characters he created. Hammett is now known as one of the best mystery writers of all time."

He was described as "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction" in his obituary in The New York Times. Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest appeared on Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

His books and stories also had a major influence on films, including the genres of private-eye/detective fiction, mystery thrillers, and film-noir.

Early life

Hammett was born near Great Mills on the "Hopewell and Aim" farm in Saint Mary's County, Maryland, to Richard Thomas Hammett and his wife Anne Bond Dashiell. His mother belonged to an old Maryland family, whose French name was De Chiel. Richard Jr. had an elder sister, Aronia, and a younger brother, Richard Jr. Sam, Hammett was baptized a Catholic and grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. When Hammett was four years old in 1898, his family immigrated to Baltimore, but for the most part, it was in Baltimore where he lived until he died in 1920, when he was 26 years old. Hammett attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute as a youth, but formal education came to an end during his first year of high school; he dropped out in 1908 due to his father's declining health and the family's need for him to pay for his care.

He left school at the age of 13 and gained several careers before joining the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He served as an operative for Pinkerton from 1915 to 1922, but with time off to serve in World War I. He learned the trade and worked in the Continental Trust Building in Baltimore, now known as One Calvert Plaza). He said he was sent by the Pinkertons to Butte, Montana, during the union strike, but some scholars doubt this happened. The agency's involvement in strike-breaking eventually disillusioned him.

Hammett joined the United States Army in 1918 and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps. During this time, he was ill with the Spanish flu and later contracted tuberculosis. He spent the bulk of his Army as a patient at Cushman Hospital in Tacoma, Washington, where he encountered Josephine Dolan, a nurse who married in San Francisco on July 7, 1921.

Source

Career and personal life

Hammett's first appearance in The Smart Set in 1922 was published in 1922. He drew on his experiences as a Pinkerton agent, owing to his writing's authenticity and realism. Hammett wrote the majority of his detective fiction while living in San Francisco in the 1920s; in his stories, streets and other San Francisco locations are frequently mentioned; "I do take the majority of my characters from real life," the author said. His books were among the first to use dialogue that sounded authentic to the time. "I am suspicious of a man who says when." If he has to be cautious not to drink too much, it's because he isn't supposed to be trusted when he does."

The bulk of his early work, which included a named private investigator, The Continental Opposition, appeared in the leading crime-fiction pulp magazine Black Mask. Both Hammett and the magazine suffered in the period before Hammett was established.

Hammett briefly stopped writing for Black Mask in 1926 due to a disagreement with editor Philip C. Cody regarding money owed from previous stories. He began working full-time as an advertisement copywriter for the Albert S. Samuels Co., a San Francisco jeweller. Joseph Thompson Shaw, who became the new editor in 1926, was lured back to writing for the Black Mask. Red Harvest was Hammett's first book, as well as his second book, The Dain Curse, to Samuels. Both these books, as well as his third, The Maltese Falcon, and fourth, The Glass Key, were first serialized in Black Mask before being redesigned and edited for publication by Alfred A. Knopf. The Maltese Falcon, which was deemed his best work, was nominated No. 81. The Mystery Writers of America has two of The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time and is dedicated to his wife Josephine.

For the most part of 1929 and 1930, he was romantically involved with Nell Martin, a writer of short stories and several novels. He dedicated The Glass Key to her, and in return, Lovers Should Marry was dedicated to him. Hammett began a 30-year friendship with Lillian Hellman, the playwright. Despite the fact that he sporadically began to work on information, he wrote his last book in 1934, more than 25 years before his death. The Thin Man is dedicated to Hellman. Hellman speculated in a posthumous collection of Hammett's books, "I suppose, but I know a few of the reasons: he was sick for many of those years and getting sicker." Hellman and he lived in Pleasantville, New York, in the 1940s.

Raymond Chandler, who was often thought of Hammett's replacement, outlined his contributions to The Simple Art of Murder:

André Gide, a French author, was highly critical of Hammett, saying, "I regard his Red Harvest as a triumph, the last word in horror, mistrust, and terror." Dashiell Hammett's dialogues, in which every character is attempting to deceive all the others and in which the truth gradually becomes apparent through a fog of deception, can only be compared to the best in Hemingway."

Source