Facts about Dashiell Hammett
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Longtime companion Lillian Hellman, the playwright, was the primary influence in Dashiell Hammett's life during his later decades despite their never marrying.
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Born Samuel Dashiell Hammett in Maryland in 1894, he left school at age thirteen to help support his family.
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Hammett's relationship with leftist politics led the FBI to maintain a file on him spanning decades, eventually contributing to his blacklisting during the McCarthy era of the 1950s.
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Hammett's 1922 novella The Continental Op first appeared in Black Mask magazine, establishing the archetypal hard-boiled detective voice that would dominate American crime fiction for decades.
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Hammett's 1923 short story collection Poisonville, later expanded as Red Harvest, earned him only nine hundred dollars from Black Mask magazine despite revolutionizing American crime fiction.
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Two years after leaving prison in 1953, Hammett earned merely ninety dollars annually while his books remained in print and generated substantial royalties directed to the government for back taxes.
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Hammett's final novel, The Thin Man, published in 1934, became a bestseller and spawned six successful Hollywood films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy between 1934 and 1947.
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Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest introduced the Continental Op, a nameless detective whose cynical voice became the prototype for hard-boiled detective fiction.
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In 1951, Hammett served five months in federal prison for refusing to name sources in a bail fund investigation, costing him his security clearance and income.
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The Maltese Falcon, published in 1930, earned Dashiell Hammett only five hundred dollars despite becoming one of American literature's most influential detective novels.
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During World War I, Dashiell Hammett served as a Pinkerton detective before contracting tuberculosis while working as a sergeant in the Army Medical Corps in 1918.