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Paul Cain (pen Name)
George Caryl Sims (May 30, 1902 – June 23, 1966), better known by his pen names Paul Cain and Peter Ruric, was an American pulp fiction author and screenwriter. He is best known for his novel ''Fast One'', which is considered to be a landmark of the pulp fiction genre and was called the "high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner" by Raymond Chandler.''Danger Is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines'', by Lee Server (Chronicle Books, 1993) (p.70). Lee Server, author of the ''Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers'', called ''Fast One'' "a cold-hearted, machine-gun-paced masterwork" and his other writings "gemlike, stoic and merciless vignettes that seemed to come direct from the bootlegging front lines." Sims enjoyed a brief career in Hollywood as a screenwriter during the 1930s and 1940s, including writing the screenplay for the Boris Karloff vehicle ''The Black Cat''. Career The events of Sims' life have been difficult for later biographers to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Des Moines, Iowa
Des Moines () is the capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Iowa. It is also the county seat of Polk County. A small part of the city extends into Warren County. It was incorporated on September 22, 1851, as Fort Des Moines, which was shortened to "Des Moines" in 1857. It is located on, and named after, the Des Moines River, which likely was adapted from the early French name, ''Rivière des Moines,'' meaning "River of the Monks". The city's population was 214,133 as of the 2020 census. The six-county metropolitan area is ranked 83rd in terms of population in the United States with 699,292 residents according to the 2019 estimate by the United States Census Bureau, and is the largest metropolitan area fully located within the state. Des Moines is a major center of the US insurance industry and has a sizable financial services and publishing business base. The city was credited as the "number one spot for U.S. insurance companies" in a ''Business Wire'' articl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Los Angeles
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world's most populous megacities. Los Angeles is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. With a population of roughly 3.9 million residents within the city limits , Los Angeles is known for its Mediterranean climate, ethnic and cultural diversity, being the home of the Hollywood film industry, and its sprawling metropolitan area. The city of Los Angeles lies in a basin in Southern California adjacent to the Pacific Ocean in the west and extending through the Santa Monica Mountains and north into the San Fernando Valley, with the city bordering the San Gabriel Valley to it's east. It covers about , and is the county seat of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with an estim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett (; May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade ('' The Maltese Falcon''), Nick and Nora Charles (''The Thin Man''), the Continental Op (''Red Harvest'' and '' The Dain Curse'') and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9. Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time". In his obituary in ''The New York Times'', he was described as "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction." ''Time'' included Hammett's 1929 novel ''Red Harvest'' on its list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. In 1990, the Crime Writers' Association picked three of his five novels for their list of '' The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time''. Five years later, four out of five of his novels made '' The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Black Mask (magazine)
''Black Mask'' was a pulp magazine first published in April 1920 by the journalist H. L. Mencken and the drama critic George Jean Nathan. The magazine was one of several money-making publishing ventures to support the prestigious literary magazine ''The Smart Set'', which Mencken edited, and which had operated at a loss since at least 1917. Under their editorial hand, the magazine was not exclusively a publisher of crime fiction, offering, according to the magazine, "the best stories available of adventure, the best mystery and detective stories, the best romances, the best love stories, and the best stories of the occult." The magazine's first editor was Florence Osborne (credited as F. M. Osborne). Editorial control After eight issues, Mencken and Nathan considered their initial $600 investment to have been sufficiently profitable, and they sold the magazine to its publishers, Eltinge Warner and Eugene Crow, for $12,500. The magazine was then edited by George W. Sutton (1922 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gertrude Michael
Lillian Gertrude Michael (June 1, 1911 – December 31, 1964) was an American film, stage and television actress. Biography The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Carl H. Michael, she was born in Talladega, Alabama. She graduated from Talladega High school at the age of 14. In her youth, she played piano and organ, and she began Little Theatres in two communities. She became a singer on the radio. Michael attended the University of Alabama, where she studied law, and Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, pursuing a study of music. Then she went to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music to continue studying music. Her work there earned her a scholarship for studying five years in Italy. Her childhood home in Talladega, Alabama was destroyed by fire in 2007. In 1929 in Cincinnati she made her stage debut in the Stuart Walker stock theater company. She subsequently appeared on Broadway in Rachel Crothers' ''Caught Wet'' (1931). She entered the movies playing Richard Arlen's f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rurikids
The Rurik dynasty ( be, Ру́рыкавічы, Rúrykavichy; russian: Рю́риковичи, Ryúrikovichi, ; uk, Рю́риковичі, Riúrykovychi, ; literally "sons/scions of Rurik"), also known as the Rurikid dynasty or Rurikids, was a noble lineage founded by the Varangian prince Rurik, who established himself in Novgorod around the year AD 862. The Rurikids were the ruling dynasty of Kievan Rus' (after the conquest of Kiev by Oleg of Novgorod in 882) before it finally disintegrated in the mid-13th century, as well as the successor Rus' principalities and Rus' prince republics of Novgorod, Pskov, Vladimir-Suzdal, Ryazan, Smolensk, Galicia-Volhynia (after 1199), Chernigov, and the Grand Duchy of Moscow (from 1263). Following the disintegration of Kievan Rus', the most powerful state to eventually arise was the Grand Duchy of Moscow, initially a part of Vladimir-Suzdal, which, along with the Novgorod Republic, established the basis of the modern Russian nation.Excerp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rurik
Rurik (also Ryurik; orv, Рюрикъ, Rjurikŭ, from Old Norse '' Hrøríkʀ''; russian: Рюрик; died 879); be, Рурык, Ruryk was a semi-legendary Varangian chieftain of the Rus' who in the year 862 was invited to reign in Novgorod. According to the '' Primary Chronicle'', Rurik was succeeded by his kinsman Oleg who was regent for his infant son Igor. He is considered to be the founder of the Rurik dynasty, which went on to rule Kievan Rus' and its principalities, and then the Tsardom of Russia, until the death of Feodor I in 1598. Vasili IV, who reigned until 1610, was the last Rurikid monarch of Russia. Life The only surviving information about Rurik is contained in the 12th-century '' Primary Chronicle'' written by one Nestor, which states that Chuds, Eastern Slavs, Merias, Veses, and Krivichs "drove the Varangians back beyond the sea, refused to pay them tribute, and set out to govern themselves". Afterwards the tribes started fighting each other and d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter The Great
Peter I ( – ), most commonly known as Peter the Great,) or Pyotr Alekséyevich ( rus, Пётр Алексе́евич, p=ˈpʲɵtr ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪtɕ, , group=pron was a Russian monarch who ruled the Tsardom of Russia from to 1721 and subsequently the Russian Empire until his death in 1725, jointly ruling with his elder half-brother, Ivan V until 1696. He is primarily credited with the modernisation of the country, transforming it into a European power. Through a number of successful wars, he captured ports at Azov and the Baltic Sea, laying the groundwork for the Imperial Russian Navy, ending uncontested Swedish supremacy in the Baltic and beginning the Tsardom's expansion into a much larger empire that became a major European power. He led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernised and based on the Enlightenment. Peter's reforms had a lasting ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mina Loy
Mina Loy (born Mina Gertrude Löwy; 27 December 1882 – 25 September 1966) was a British-born artist, writer, poet, playwright, novelist, painter, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first-generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, and Yvor Winters, among others. As stated by Nicholas Fox Weber in the ''New York Times'', "This brave soul had the courage and wit to be original. Mina Loy may never be more than a vaguely familiar name, a passing satellite, but at least she sparkled from an orbit of her own choosing." Early life and education Loy was born in Hampstead, London. She was the daughter of a Hungarian Jewish tailor, Sigmund Felix Lowy, who had moved to London to evade persistent antisemitism in Budapest, and a Christian, English mother, Julia Bryan. Loy reflected on their relationship, and the productio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boris Dralyuk
Boris Dralyuk (born in 1982) is a Ukrainian-American writer, editor and translator. He obtained his high school degree from Fairfax High School and his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA. He has taught Russian literature at his alma mater and at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His writings have appeared in numerous outlets such as ''Times Literary Supplement'', ''New Yorker'', ''New York Review of Books'', ''London Review of Books'', ''Paris Review'', ''Granta'', ''World Literature Today'', etc. He is chief editor of the ''Los Angeles Review of Books'' and the managing editor of ''Cardinal Points.'' A specialist in the history of noir fiction, he has written introductions to the reissued works of Raoul Whitfield. In 2022, Dralyuk published his debut poetry collection ''My Hollywood and Other Poems'' with Paul Dry Books. It was reviewed positively by Anahid Neressian in ''The New York Review of Books'', who remarked that an "air of upbeat sorrow permeate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Myrna Loy
Myrna Loy (born Myrna Adele Williams; August 2, 1905 – December 14, 1993) was an American film, television and stage actress. Trained as a dancer, Loy devoted herself fully to an acting career following a few minor roles in silent films. She was originally typecast in exotic roles, often as a vamp or a woman of Asian descent, but her career prospects improved greatly following her portrayal of Nora Charles in ''The Thin Man'' (1934). Born in Helena, Montana, Loy was raised in rural Radersburg during her early childhood, before relocating to Los Angeles with her mother in her early adolescence. There, she began studying dance, and trained extensively throughout her high school education. She was discovered by production designer Natacha Rambova, who helped facilitate film auditions for her, and she began obtaining small roles in the late 1920s, mainly portraying vamps. Her role in ''The Thin Man'' helped elevate her reputation as a versatile actress, and she reprised the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Woman Of The Sea
''A Woman of the Sea'', also known by its working title ''Sea Gulls'', is an unreleased silent film produced in 1926 by the Chaplin Film Company. It is one of only two lost Charlie Chaplin films (the other being '' Her Friend the Bandit''), having been destroyed by Chaplin himself as a tax writeoff. The now lost film starred Edna Purviance, Raymond Bloomer, Eve Southern and Charles French, and was directed by Josef von Sternberg. Plot Joan ( Purviance) and Magdalen (Sothern) are the daughters of a fisherman in Monterey. Magdalen is engaged to Peter ( Bloomer), a lowly fisher, until a writer ( Whitman) comes to town. Both Joan and Magdalen fancy the writer, but Magdalen wins him over in the end and he takes her back to the big city. Joan and Peter then marry and stay in Monterey. Many years later, Magdalen returns and attempts to break up her sister's marriage, only to fail. Cast and crew Cast * Edna Purviance as Joan * Eve Sothern as Magdalen * Raymond Bloomer as Pet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
