HELP! i need to write a biography about Dashiell Hammett?

Question

any good websites?

anyone wanna tell me anything about him?

Answer 1

Born in Maryland in 1894, Samuel Dashiell Hammett dropped out of school at fourteen. Over the next several years he held a string of menial jobs, from which he was usually fired.

In 1915, he responded to an intriguingly vague classified ad, and soon found himself employed as a Pinkerton detective. Around 1922 he decided to stop being a detective and start writing about them.

Appearing primarily in the pulp magazine Black Mask, Hammett's work soon became a favorite with readers. Bringing his real-life detective experience to his writing, he is today regarded as a founding father of the "hard-boiled" genre, as well as elevating detective fiction to the level of literature.

Many of his stories featured a pudgy, middle-aged operative of the Continental Detective Agency, known only as The Continental Op. His best-known creation was Sam Spade, the tough, shifty detective of The Maltese Falcon. Like the Op, Spade was based in San Francisco, a city Hammett knew well. If a Hammett story mentioned a pawnshop or apartment building at a certain location, it probably existed, and possibly still does.

Hammett's writing career was short. He produced four novels and almost all of his short stories between 1922 and 1931, a span of barely nine years. A fifth novel (The Thin Man) followed in 1934. Then... nothing.

Why the long silence? Ironically, Hammett had come to loathe the hard-boiled genre that he had pioneered. He aspired to write mainstream novels that would rival those of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It wasn't to be: Hammett barely published another word during the last 27 years of his life.

During the 1950s, Hammett's support of leftist causes brought the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he was called upon to testify. Hammett's refusal to name names resulted in five months behind bars. It also caused him to be blacklisted; his books were removed from libraries, and his radio shows cancelled.

A man of many contradictions, Hammett was a celebrity and a recluse, a writer so sucessful that he no longer needed to write, a Marxist who served America proudly in two World Wars, a wealthy man who was always broke, and a man who chose prison over revealing information that was nobody else's business.

Hounded by the IRS, he died near-penniless in 1961.

this is pasted from:
http://www.mikehumbert.com/Dashiell_Hammett_01_Short_Bio.html

Answer 2

~try this
http://www.januarymagazine.com/features/hammettintro.html