Who is Dashiell Hammett?

It’s possible that more people attended Dashiell Hammett’s birth than his funeral. Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary's County, Maryland, on May 27, 1894, on the family farm called, with a touch of fateful poetry, Hopewell and Aim. Hammett grew to be a solitary teenager, quick to fight and hungry to read, a frequenter of libraries. The family’s shaky finances obliged him to quit school at fourteen and go to work.

In 1915 Hammett joined the Baltimore office of Pinkerton’s National Detective Service and subsequently filed three years of case reports, whose sparsely embellished style colored most everything Hammett ever wrote. When Hammett joined the U.S. Army in 1918, he never got closer to World War I than Camp Meade, Maryland, where he drove an ambulance until his tuberculosis led to an honorable discharge. Hammett then resumed his Pinkerton career in Washington state, where TB eventually landed him back in a military hospital.

There he met Josephine “Jose” Dolan, a nurse whose care proved so attentive that they moved to San Francisco and married in July of 1921. They welcomed their first daughter four months later. In October 1922, after a year of scribbling at the San Francisco Public Library, Hammett sent H.L. Mencken a very short story called “The Parthian Shot” for his magazine The Smart Set. The story was published, launching Hammett's career.

From The Smart Set, Hammett soon graduated to detective stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask about a nameless detective. In time, self-contained stories gave way to installments of serial novels, which Hammett then reworked into the books Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929). He published The Maltese Falcon in 1930, moved to New York, and wrote The Glass Key (1931) and The Thin Man (1934), his last novel.

By 1934, Hammett was written out. Though he had separated from Jose five years before and begun a lasting affair with the playwright Lillian Hellman in 1931, though he remained a devoted absentee father to his girls in southern California. More and more, Hammett concentrated his energies on politics. He gave considerable sums of money to help fight fascism in Spain, co-published a magazine called Equality, and gave many political speeches. In 1942, he rejoined the U.S. Army during World War II as an unhealthy forty-eight-year old private and served three years in Alaska, editing the base newspaper called The Adakian.

But his military service didn’t save him during the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s, when he spent six months in jail for contempt of court. Senator Joseph McCarthy even succeeded in yanking three-hundred copies of Hammett's books from State Department libraries around the world, until they were restored by order of one highly placed fan: President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

None of this persecution was good for Hammett's ever-precarious health and finances. He died on January 10, 1961, in a New York hospital. Hellman, his sister, and three cousins buried him three days later in the military cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, roughly forty miles from his birthplace at Hopewell and Aim.

Excerpt taken from the National Endowment for the Arts Reader’s Guide. For more insider information on The Maltese Falcon, click here.