Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary's County, Maryland, on May 27, 1894, and grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He left school at the age of fourteen and held a variety of jobs, from messenger boy to stevedore, and finally worked as an operative for the famous Pinkerton's Detective Agency, a job that sent him west. In 1918, World War I interrupted his sleuthing, although he was discharged from the army in less than a year with tuberculosis. Spending time in several veterans' hospitals, in one he met a nurse,
Jose Dolan, and married her in 1921. Settling in San Francisco, he resumed detective work, and began to write. In 1922 he sold his first story, to H. L. Mencken's Smart Set, and quickly thereafter began to sell many to its spinoff that featured mystery and crime fiction, Black Mask. In the next decade, Hammett became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. His first four novels--Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), and The Glass Key (1931)--exerted a powerful influence on American culture and writing. His last novel, The Thin Man (1934), introduced the sophisticated husband-and-wife sleuthing team of Nick and Nora Charles.

In World War II, Hammett again served in the U.S. Army, as a sergeant in the Aleutians for most of his more than two-year stint. In 1951, he was blacklisted for his left-wing political affiliations and jailed for six months. Tax delinquency charges by the Bureau of Internal Revenue followed. He never wrote again. Dashiell Hammett died on January 10, 1961. The Continental Op was published posthumously in 1974 by arrangement with his estate's executor and longtime friend and companion, Lillian Hellman.

Some of The Writings of Dashiel Hammett