About 1930
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894 in east Maryland of a family that on both sides dated to Colonial days. His formal education stopped after one year of high school so that he could go to work to supplement his father’s meager earnings. But while his formal education ended when he was about 14, he became a genuine autodidact. He read voluminously, in all fields, throughout his life.
Hammett worked at various jobs (railroad clerk, messenger boy, among them), then landed work with the Pinkerton detective agency. With the American entry into World War I, he enlisted and served in the States. But he fell victim to the great epidemic of Spanish influenza and then developed tuberculosis.
Upon discharge, he returned to work as a Pinkerton operative and worked several famous cases in the West, including the Fatty Arbuckle case. But his health forced him to quit. TB, in fact, nearly killed him.
During a hospital stay in Tacoma, Wash., he met the woman who became his wife and bore him two daughters. They lived in San Francisco where he wrote advertising copy and later found he could write compelling, realistic detective fiction.
A promotional photo, 1930s
With publication in 1930 of his third novel, The Maltese Falcon, Hammett achieved worldwide fame. He had not been living with his family, because doctors advised against it due to the infectiousness of TB. But now he left them altogether, making official what had been evident for a while: that he could never live a domestic life.
Hollywood producers now sought him. He became one of the highest paid screenwriters and began a life of high-living—boozing and whoring on both coasts. In 1930, he met and began a 30-year affair with Lillian Hellman. By the middle of the decade, he was no longer writing to completion and he never published another novel or much of anything else.
In the late 1930s, he became active in liberal and left-wing causes. He considered himself a Marxist and signed many a petition and gave many a speech for the American Communist Party.
At 48, on the third try, he convinced the Army to take him as a soldier in World War II. In his second year in uniform, he was posted to the Aleutian Islands, where he traveled up and down the chain giving “Why We Fight” lectures, and where—on Adak Island—he created and edited the post newspaper.
After the war, he continued to be politically active in civil-liberty and economic-justice causes and taught writing in New York. He was imprisoned for six months in 1951 for contempt of court for refusing to provide to a federal court in New York the names of contributors to a particular bail fund. He was blacklisted, radio programs based on his works were taken off the air, and he lost all his sources of income. To top it off, the IRS got after him for back taxes.
Hammett died in 1961 in New York. He was essentially a pauper though cared for in the later months by Hellman.
A veteran of both world wars, he’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery as Samuel D. Hammett.
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For a quick hit on Hammett’s life, especially that part of it shared with Lillian Hellman, read Joan Mellen’s March 2009 lecture.
Another quickie is Richard Layman’s 2005 lecture on the 75th anniversary of Hammett’s Maltese Falcon that explores the novel, its creation and its meaning for Hammett’s life.
One of the best things to read about Hammett’s days in Alaska–written in 1945, a few months after his discharge–is the article published in Yank: The Army Weekly, written by Sgt. Al Weisman. (This online offering cannot be printed.)
Some of the principal full-length biographies of Hammett are these:
Shadow Man by Richard Layman (1981)–Layman did the initial ground work into Hammett’s life.
Dashiell Hammett: A Life by Diane Johnson (1983)–the “authorized biography,” published a year before Lillian Hellman, who authorized it, died. Solid, and Johnson doesn’t sing Hellman’s song.
Hellman and Hammett (1996), a dual biography by Joan Mellen that is the most entertaining and well written of books about them.
Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers (2001), by Jo Hammett, ed. by Richard Layman with Julie M. Rivett. Hammett was not a family man, but this book offers a picture of him as something pretty close to it, a husband, father and grandfather who lived up to quite a few of the expectations of such roles, at least some of the time. It was written by the younger of his two daughters, who had access to letters and other family memorabilia and who was assisted by her daughter (Rivett) and one of Hammett’s principal biographers. Best illustrated (photos) of Hammett biographies.
