Dashiell Hammett

American · 1894 to 1961

Born Samuel Dashiell Hammett on May 27, 1894, on the Hopewell and Aim tobacco farm in Saint Mary's County, Maryland, to Richard Hammett, a politician and farmer, and Anne Bond Dashiell, of an old Maryland family, he grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore and dropped out of the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute at thirteen to help support the household. He worked as a newsboy, a freight clerk, and a railroad messenger. In 1915 he joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and worked seven years as an operative, including, he later claimed, in the Anaconda copper strikes at Butte, Montana. The Pinkertons' role in strike-breaking eventually disgusted him. He enlisted as an Army ambulance driver in 1918, caught the Spanish flu, then tuberculosis, and spent most of his service as a patient in Cushman Hospital in Tacoma, where he married his nurse Josephine Dolan in 1921. He began writing short fiction for Black Mask in 1922 to support a family his lungs would not let him live with. Red Harvest (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934), four novels in five years, invented a kind of stripped American prose that Hemingway admired and that Chandler would extend. He created Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and Nick and Nora Charles. He stopped writing fiction at forty. In Hollywood he met the playwright Lillian Hellman, with whom he lived, on and off, for the rest of his life. He served six months in federal prison in 1951 for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He died of lung cancer in New York City on January 10, 1961, at sixty-six.