The Long Goodbye
by Raymond Chandler
List Price: $12.00
Pages: 384
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0394757688
Publisher: Vintage
Raymond Chandler, born in Chicago on July 23, 1888, emigrated with
his family at the age of twelve to England, where he was educated at Dulwich
College. He took a civil service job in London and contributed to literary
weeklies. Dissatisfied with his progress as a writer, in 1912 he moved
to Los Angeles and worked briefly as a bookkeeper before serving in the
Canadian army and the R.A.F. in World War I. Upon his return to California,
he took a job as an executive with an oil company and, in 1924, married
Cissy Pascal, a pianist seventeen years his senior. After ten years at
Dabney Oil, a period in which he wrote barely at all, he was fired for
alcoholism. It was then that he turned to writing pulp detective stories,
publishing his first at the age of forty-five in Black Mask. His
first novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939, sealed his membership in the
hard-boiled school of crime fiction.
Philip Marlowe novels that
followed were Farewell, My Lovely (1940); The High Window
(1942); The Lady in the Lake (1943); and The Little Sister
(1949). As a screenwriter, Chandler wrote The Blue Dahlia (1946)
and coauthored Double Indemnity (1944) and Strangers on a Train
(1951).
Raymond Chandler died in La
Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959.
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