Samuel Fuller is the writer-director (and often producer) of all of the films he has made since 1949--a creative accomplishment approached in the American cinema only by Orson Welles, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Preston Sturges. Fuller has produced an intensely personal body of work within the confines of Hollywood's established "B" feature genres: war movies, Westerns, gangster films. Violence, irony, and paradox are at the heart of Fuller's cinema; his scripts are simple, direct, and crude; his protagonists emotional, obsessed outsiders often living on the fringes of society.

Samuel Michael Fuller was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. His father died when he was ten, and his family moved to New York City, where he found a job as a newspaper hawker. Quitting high school, Fuller became a copyboy for Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane. At seventeen he became the youngest crime and police reporter in the country, working for the...