Hammett, (Samuel) Dashiell

(1894-1961)

   Born in Maryland, Dashiell Hammett had a perfunctory education, and after a series of clerical jobs, in 1915 he found work with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Baltimore. In 1918, Hammett joined the army and served for a year. After the war, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked briefly as a Pinkerton agent once more. However, he also began to write short detective stories, which helped establish a genre in American fiction. In his stories of the “Continental Op” published in Smart Set and Black Mask and the novels Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929), Hammett introduced the cynical hero without illusions who reached his most developed form as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930). Cool detachment of a more sophisticated style was the characteristic of Nick Charles in The Thin Man (1934).

   From the mid-1930s onward, Hammett wrote mainly for Hollywood and with his partner, Lillian Hellman. He also became involved in various left-wing causes. In 1942, despite his age and health problems (he had bronchial problems after a bout of influenza in 1918 and 1919), Hammett joined the army in 1942 and served until 1945. In 1951, he refused to give information about donors to a bail fund established to aid political defendants charged under the loyalty laws and was jailed. In 1953, he was called to give evidence before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, and in 1955 he also had to give evidence before the New York State Joint Legislative Committee with regard to groups with supposed communist sympathies. For most of these years, Hammett was deprived of income due to action by the Internal Revenue Service to reclaim unpaid back taxes and forced to depend on the charity of friends. Because of his political views, some of his books were withdrawn from public libraries, but his work continued to be popular in Europe and was rediscovered by American readers in the 1970s and 1980s.

   See also Literature and theater.