Upon the publication of his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), Raymond Chandler was hailed as one of the leading practitioners of the American hard-boiled detective novel, but he received virtually no recognition as a writer of serious literature....

In the late 1940s well-known British author and critic Evelyn Waugh hailed Raymond Chandler as America's "greatest living writer." Poet W. H. Auden stated that Chandler's mystery novels "should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works...