Dashiell Hammett is generally credited with bringing a new degree of authenticity as well as artistry to the crime fiction that flourished in the pulp magazines of the first decades of the twentieth century. Hammett created several of the most famous...

In March 1928, just after Dashiell Hammett had submitted his first novel for publication, he wrote to his editor, Blanche Knopf, that unlike most moderately literate people, he took detective fiction seriously: "Some day somebody's going to make...

"I'm one of the few--if there are any more--people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously," Dashiell Hammett wrote to his publisher in 1928 at the beginning of his novel-writing career. "I don't mean that I necessarily take my own...

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was a seminal figure in the development of the peculiarly American contribution to crime fiction--the hard-boiled detective story. Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born of English and French descendants on May 27, 1894, on the...