If hardboiled fiction was, paradoxically, romance, Chandler made it even more romantic." Chandler biographer Frank MacShane viewed him as a thematic heir to Chaucer and Dickens and as such "one of the most important writers of his time, as well as one of the most delightful."
Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888, the only child of Florence and Maurice Chandler. His mother was Irish, his father an Irish-American from Philadelphia. Maurice Chandler worked for the railway and traveled a lot, which was just as well; the elder Chandler was an alcoholic who, when home, was "found drunk if he was found at all," as Tom Hiney put it in Raymond Chandler: A Biography.
Enjoys Proper British Upbringing
When the Chandlers divorced in 1895, Florence and her son went to England. There they moved in with Florence's mother and one of her sisters in the north London suburb of Upper Norwood. Young Raymond was raised in what one of his friends described in an essay in Miriam Gross's The World of Raymond Chandler as an atmosphere of "'high Victorian rectitude,' which resulted in Chandler developing a puritan streak and a fascination with the dark side of the masculine psyche."
A well-to-do Irish uncle paid Chandler's tuition at nearby Dulwich College, the same public school attended around this same time by authors P.
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