|
S. S. Van Dine (also styled S.S. Van Dine〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/341839.S_S_Van_Dine )〕) is the pseudonym used by American art critic Willard Huntington Wright (October 15, 1888 – April 11, 1939) when he wrote detective novels. Wright was an important figure in avant-garde cultural circles in pre-WWI New York, and under the pseudonym (which he originally used to conceal his identity) he created the once immensely popular fictional detective Philo Vance, a sleuth and aesthete who first appeared in books in the 1920s, then in movies and on the radio. ==Early life and career== Willard Huntington Wright was born to Archibald Davenport Wright and Annie Van Vranken Wright on October 15, 1888, in Charlottesville, Virginia. His younger brother, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, became a respected painter and one of the first American abstract artists, founder of the school of modern art known as "Synchromism". Willard and Stanton were raised in Santa Monica, California, where their father owned a hotel. Willard, a largely self-taught writer, attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College, and Harvard University without graduating. In 1907, he married Katharine Belle Boynton of Seattle, Washington; they had one child, Beverley. After divorcing Katharine, whom he had abandoned early in their marriage, he married for a second time in October 1930. His second wife was Eleanor Rulapaugh, known professionally as Claire De Lisle, a portrait painter and socialite.〔Biographical information for this entry is taken from John Loughery, ''Alias S.S. Van Dine: The Man Who Created Philo Vance.''〕 At age 21, Wright began his professional writing career as literary editor of the ''Los Angeles Times'', where he was known for his scathing book reviews and irreverent opinions. He was particularly caustic about romance and detective fiction. His friend and mentor H.L. Mencken was an early inspiration. Other important literary influences included Oscar Wilde and Ambrose Bierce. Wright was an advocate of the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser, and Wright's own novel, ''The Man of Promise'' (1916), was written in a similar style. He also published realist fiction as editor of the New York literary magazine ''The Smart Set,'' from 1912 to 1914, a job he attained with Mencken's help. He was fired from that position when the magazine's conservative owner felt that Wright was intentionally provoking their middle-class readership with his interest in unconventional and often sexually explicit fiction. In his two-year tenure, Wright published short stories by Gabriele D'Annunzio, Floyd Dell, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, and George Moore; a play by Joseph Conrad; and poems by Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. Wright's energies were devoted to numerous projects, reflecting his wide range of interests. His book ''What Nietzsche Taught'' appeared in 1915. An attempt to popularize the German philosopher with skeptical American audiences, it described and commented on all of Nietzsche's books and provided quotations from each work. Wright continued to write short stories in this period; in 2012 Brooks Hefner revealed heretofore unknown short stories that featured an intellectual criminal, written by Wright under a pseudonym several years before his adoption of the Van Dine pseudonym. Wright was, however, most respected in intellectual circles for his writing about art. In ''Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning'' (secretly co-authored in 1915 with his brother Stanton), he surveyed the important art movements of the last hundred years from Manet to Cubism, praised the largely unknown work of Cézanne, and predicted a coming era in which an art of color abstraction would replace realism. Admired by people like Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, Wright became under his brother's tutelage one of the most progressive (and belligerently opinionated) art critics of the time and helped to organize several shows, including the "Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters", that brought the most advanced new painters to the attention of audiences on both coasts. He also published a work of aesthetic philosophy, ''The Creative Will'' (1916), that O'Keeffe and William Faulkner both regarded as a meaningful influence on their thinking about artistic identity. In 1917, Wright published ''Misinforming a Nation'', in which he mounted a blistering attack on alleged inaccuracies and British biases in the ''Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition''. A Germanophile, Wright did not support America's decision to join the Allied cause in World War I, and he was blackballed from journalism for more than two years after an overzealous secretary (erroneously) accused him of spying for Germany, an episode that became a much-publicized scandal in New York in November 1917. Though cleared, his favourable view of Prussian militarism cost him his friendships with Mencken and Dreiser. After suffering a nervous breakdown and the beginning of a long-term dependence on illegal drugs, Wright retreated to California, where he attempted to make a living as a newspaper columnist in San Francisco. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「S. S. Van Dine」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|