Throughout his career Cain resisted the label, arguing in
The Butterfly preface that he belonged "to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise." But the reputation has stuck.
The leisure and privilege James Mallahan Cain enjoyed as a child and his intellectual pursuits as a young man seem antithetical to the passions and violence of his work. His characters, whose attitudes and outlooks are at odds with middle-class sensibilities, come from the underbelly of society. However, suggests Paul Skenazy in his 1989 study, "Cain's writings develop from his failed ambitions, his unacknowledged insecurities, and a lifelong sense of exclusion into a curious mixture of recounted experiences, the recasting of unsatisfied desires, and the creation of alternative male personalities." Cain's life prepared him for the tough-guy persona of his fiction.
All four of Cain's grandparents emigrated from Ireland in 1850 and settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where his parents grew up. His father, James W. "Jim" Cain, was born in 1860. When Jim was sixteen, his mother, Mary Kelly Cain, died. Jim's father, P. W. Cain, remarried three years later, but Jim was unable to accept his new stepmother and gradually began to spend more and more time in town with the Mallahans, family friends whose youngest daughter, Rose, captivated his attentions.
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