Hellman strove to rectify the situation, in part by idealizing Hammett and their relationship, and the author's continued fame has relied almost as much on a romanticized persona as on his fictional works. Hammett's artistic legacy is a vision of a violent, morally rudderless society in which his characters try to navigate with only their own ethical codes to guide them. His prose--brutal, ironic, and slangy--quickly and permanently came to be considered the epitome of the hard-boiled style.
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on 27 May 1894 on his grandfather's farm, Hopewell and Aim, near Baltimore, Maryland, to Richard and Annie Bond Hammett. His education was limited: in 1908 he left the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute after being enrolled in the high school for less than a semester. Hammett contributed to the family 's failing finances with a series of office jobs. In 1915 he began working for the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, an organization that provided a variety of services from insurance investigations to strikebreaking. He traveled throughout the western United States on assignment for the agency for two years, and his experiences as a Pinkerton operative provided much of the material for his subsequent career as a writer.
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