商品簡介
"Chandler never wrote an autobiography or a memoir. Now Barry Day, making use of Chandler's novels, short stories, and letters as well as Day's always illuminating commentary, gives us the life of "the man with no home," a man precariously balanced between his classical English education with its immutable values and that of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War, with its resulting changing vernacular. Through his fiction and letters, brilliantly woven together, Chandler reveals what it was like to be a writer, and in particular what it was to be a writer of "hard-boiled" fiction in what was for him "another language." Along the way, he discusses the work of his contemporaries: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Somerset Maugham, among others. Here is Chandler's Los Angeles, a city he adopted and which adopted him in the post-World War I period...Chandler on his Hollywood, working with Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and others...Chandler...organized crime and on his alter ego, Philip Marlowe, private eye, the incorruptible knight with little armour who walks the "mean streets" in a world not made for knights...on drinking (his life in the end was in a race with alcohol--and loneliness)...and here are Chandler's women--the Little Sisters; the dames--in his fiction--and his life"--
作者簡介
BARRY DAY was born in England and received his M.A. from Balliol College, Oxford. In addition to his books on Noel Coward, Day has written about Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Johnny Mercer, and Rodgers and Hart. He has written and produced plays and musical revues showcasing the work of Coward, the Lunts, Oscar Wilde, and others. Day is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Trustee of the Noel Coward Foundation and was awarded the Order of the British Empire. He lives in New York, London, and Palm Beach.
