Dashiell Hammett by Edward Bieberman, 1937.

Samuel Dasheill Hammett was born on May 27, 1894,in St. Mary's County, Maryland.  He was a very fat baby.  He grew up in Baltimore and Philadelphia.  

He left school at the age of 14, and had a series of jobs, usually getting fired, until he started working for Pinkerton in 1915.

From the very beginning he had a overpowering influence on people, which made them eager to please him, and afraid to make him angry.  He had his first job at fourteen years old, working for a Railroad company.  One day when he came to work, his manager told Hammett that he was fired because he was consistently late.  Hammett started to leave without any protest, the manager had a change of heart and called him back saying, he could have his job back if he promised never to be late again.  Hammett refused saying, "Thank you, but I can't do that." He got his job back anyway.

picture from:  http://www.butteamerica.com/hist.htm

In his early 20s he worked as a detective in San Francisco.  His job experience provided the basis for his novels.

During World War I he enlisted in the army but only a year later he got influenza which later turned into tuberculosis.  The disease greatly affected his health and recurred several times in throughout his life.

While in the hospital recovering from tuberculosis he fell in love with a nurse named Josephine Dolan.  They were married on July 7th, 1921 in San Francisco.  Hammett's first daughter was born in October of that year.  After the birth of his second daughter, Hammett's health put his wife and the girls at risk of infection so they lived apart for quite a while and finally divorced in 1937.

Josephine Dollan

picture from:  http://www.butteamerica.com/hist.htm

He always wanted to travel to Australia and was nearly given that chance when he rejoined the Pinkerton detective agency, but his ill health lead him to resign from the agency and caused him to loose his chance of going to Australia.

After leaving Pinkerson, he joined a business college to study journalism.  At the same time he started writing detective stories.  Several of his stories were rejected by publishers until he finally had a breakthrough.  He published his first work under the pseudonym Peter Collinson in Black Mask Magazine.

He worked as an advertising manager for a jewelry store, writing advertisements for them.

When the second World War started, Hammett tried several times to join the army again, but he was turned down because of his age.  He was forty-eight at the time, but he didn't give up, and was finally accepted as an army newspaper editor in the Aleutian Islands.

He lived on and off with an accomplished screen writer named Lillian Hellman during a period of 31 years.  She was twelve years younger than he.  Their relationship as lovers was not always good but they remained good friends throughout.

Lillian Hellman

picture from:  http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc55.html

He had cuts on his legs and an indentation on his forehead.  He spent money lavishly, especially on women.  He was elegant, well educated, and gentle.  He loved baseball and mathematics was his favorite subject.  He loved paintings and music, but didn't like painters and musicians much.

He would have drinking bouts for days at a time and then a period in between when he wouldn't drink at all and work on his novels or stories.  This continued for many years until a doctor warned him about his health, after that he never drank again except one martini towards the end of his life.

His writing career only lasted twelve years.  He wrote five novels and over eighty short stories.

He was fond of attending parties, but would refrain when he was writing novels.  He would spend days on end locked up in a room until his work was finished.

He was a Marxist, and at one point he is believed to have joined the Communist party.  Eventually he and his companion Lillian found themselves on the Hollywood Blacklist during the McCarthy era.  He became president of the New York Civil Rights Congress, he was a trustee for a bail fund for some communists who were on trial for conspiracy.  After they jumped bail, Hammett was sent to jail for six months for contempt after he took the Fifth Amendment and refused to reveal the names of contributors of the bail.

He was charged $140,000 by IRS for back-taxes. His income was seized.  Lillian Hellmann was charged as well for $175,000.

Two months before his death, Hammett was diagnosed with lung cancer.  Two days before his death he slipped into a comma and died on January 10th 1961.  Despites efforts by J. Edgar Hoover to prevent it, Hammett was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

picture from:  http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhammett.htm

At the time of his death he was working on a novel called Tulip.  He never got a chance to finish it.  It was later published by Lillian Hellman as a short story.  He died poor.

Lillian Hellman dedicated her estate to the Hammett-Hellman grant for writers who face political persecution.  There is also a literary award named after Hammett for literary excellence in the crime genre.