Major works:
The Killer Inside Me • Pop. 1280 • A Hell of a Woman
Jim Thompson was an American novelist and screenwriter whose crime fiction transformed pulp storytelling. Born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906, Thompson worked as a hotel bellboy, oilfield laborer, and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, an experience that inspired his first published writing, Oilfield Vignettes (1929). In the early 1930s, Thompson served as head of the Oklahoma Federal Writers’ Project and briefly attended the University of Nebraska before leaving school in 1931. He published his first novels in the 1940s and worked for a short time as a reporter for the Los Angeles Mirror. Thompson’s writing career reached its peak in the 1950s, during which he published more than a dozen novels, including The Killer Inside Me (1952), Savage Night (1953), and The Getaway (1958). He also co-wrote the screenplays for Stanley Kubrick’s films The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957). Thompson wrote more than thirty novels in total, many of which were adapted for film. Although his work received limited recognition during his lifetime, his reputation grew substantially after his death in 1977, and he is now regarded as a central figure in twentieth-century American crime fiction.
“Thompson at his best casts the coldest possible eye on life and death and offers us an unsparing view of the human condition.” – The New York Times
Books
