Item #26854 Selected Letters 1921-60. Literary Letters, Dashiell Hammett.

Selected Letters 1921-60.

Washington D.C. Counterpoint Press, 2001. First Printing of the First Edition. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket with fading to the spine. This is the first ever collection of the letters, both private and professional, of the man who invented the modern American crime novel. Hammett's letters offer a picture of a famously complex and often contradictory man. He wrote five mystery masterpieces, served in World War II and defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings in the late 1940s. Hammett along with Raymond Chandler and James Cain took the noir mystery novel to the level of literature. In his five great crime novels, all of them written in a magnificent burst of creativity between 1927 and 1935, Dashiell Hammett gave America a cast of immortal characters-Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and Nick and Nora Charles, mold-breaking, red-blooded alternatives to Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey. In the words of Raymond Chandler, Hammett "gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols. " His letters to his family, lovers, and colleagues show his personal warmth, his political commitment, his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. With wit, intelligence, and style, these letters further confirm Hammett's extraordinary talent as writer and observer. Item #26854
ISBN: 1582430810

Price: $125.00 save 20% $100.00

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