The stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler once wrote, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”
The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett
David Lehman | The American Scholar | September 22, 2015 | 4,696 words
The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett
The stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler once wrote, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”
David Lehman | The American Scholar | Fall 2015 | 19 minutes (4,696 words)
Our latest Longreads Exclusive comes from the new issue of The American Scholar. Our thanks to them for sharing this essay with us.
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The Jeopardy category is Opening Lines, and the literary answer is “Two Bars, 52nd Street.” You need to ask what works begin in such venues. One comes to mind quickly enough, but if you have only an out-of-towner’s awareness of New York City and you have not paid close enough attention to W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” you may misread yourself 10 blocks down past Times Square.
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