Description

Carroll & Graf, New York [Published date: 2001. Hard cover, 172 pp. First Carroll & Graf Edition, 2001. Very good in very good dust jacket. Cream and maroon paper over boards have light bumping and scuffing to edges and corners. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked.Dust jacket has a few small nicks and tears and light creasing along edges. Light overall scuffing to jacket as well. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival quality Brodart cover. NOT Ex-Library. No remainder marks. [From front jacket flap] Hollywood scrccnwriter and high-flying author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man — died in 1961. For the more than forty years since, his daughter, Jo Hammett, has kept her silence. Now, for the first time, with profound admiration as well as uncompromising candor, she tells her side of the Dashiell Hammett story. In Jo Hammett’s earliest recollections, although her already famous father exists outside the sphere of the daily life she shares with her mother and sister, he writes to Jo frequently and visits when he can. Jo’s memories of him are golden: She recalls a trip to the Santa Anita racetrack in a chauffeur-driven limousine, where Hammett plays more on the horses than he can afford; she recalls a Depression-era excursion to Beverly Hills and a splurge that would have supported an entire family for a month—on a riding outfit. With more ambivalence, she remembers the 1950s, when she assumes her responsibility as the sole designated correspondent with her blacklisted, imprisoned father and her role as go-between for him and Lillian Hellman. The notorious Hammett-Hellman romance, Dash’s rude flirtations, his heavy drinking, his attraction to Communism, his quirks and betrayals and paternal love—Jo Hammett neither blinks at her father’s faults nor diminishes his humanity. In straightforward prose, with unaffected charm, she offers in this generously illustrated volume a revealing personal reminiscence that contributes immeasurably to Hammett biography.