He shared the same upbringing in a culture of strict Victorian morality, witnessed trench warfare firsthand, and was greatly disillusioned after World War I was over. His writing explores some of the same themes as his fellow modernists: the corruption of society, a search for moral standards and codes of conduct, and the need to find order amid chaos.
Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago on 23 July 1888. His father, Maurice Benjamin Chandler, worked as a civil engineer for a western railway company. His mother, Florence Thornton Chandler, was Anglo-Irish and had moved to the United States in the 1880s. Their marriage was rocky, in part because of Maurice Chandler's alcoholism, and ended in divorce when Raymond was seven years old. Left with no support, Florence Chandler and her only son moved to England in 1895 to live with her mother and an unmarried sister in South London.
As a child Chandler spent summer holidays in Waterford, Ireland, where he stayed with his uncle Ernest Thornton, an Irish Protestant who headed a solicitor's office. There, in the Anglo-Irish class system, he got his first glimpse of social stratification. Though he chafed against his family 's snobbery, Chandler was nevertheless influenced by the class prejudices around him, developing in particular a strong contempt for Irish Catholics.
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