Dashiell Hammett: The Library of America Edition

Here, for the first time in a deluxe collector’s box, is the most comprehensive edition of the hard-boiled crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett ever published. Complete Novels, the first of two volumes gathered here, presents the five groundbreaking books whose gritty, lean prose won admiration from such contemporaries as Stein, Hemingway, and Faulkner: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key,, and The Thin Man.

In the stories he wrote for Black Mask and other pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Hammett used the vernacular adventure tale to register the jarring textures and revved-up cadences of modern America. Crime Stories & Other Writings presents 24 of these classic tales, along with revealing essays and an early, unfinished version of his novel The Thin Man. The texts, reprinted here for the first time, are those that appeared originally in the pulps, without the revisions introduced by later editors.

“An invaluable collection.” —Kirkus Reviews

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.