Cornell Woolrich

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (December 4, 1903 - September 25, 1968) was an American novelist and short story writer.

Contents

[edit] Life

His parents separated when Cornell was young, and he lived in Latin America with his father, before moving back to New York City to live with his mother Claire.

He graduated from Columbia University. His first novel was Cover Charge, a Jazz Age work published in 1926. He also wrote under the pseudonyms George Hopley and William Irish. He wrote the story "It Had to be Murder" in 1942 under the Irish name. It was retitled Rear Window in 1944 and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. His The Bride Wore Black (La Mariée était en noir) was made into a film by François Truffaut.

Woolrich lived the last thirty-five years of his mother's life with her in a seedy hotel room in Harlem, New York, although he did move in and out of the room into another room at the same hotel frequently. He never allowed his mother to read any of his work.

In 1930, he married Violet Virginia Blackton, daughter of silent film producer J. Stuart Blackton, but apparently homosexual tendencies convinced him he could not remain married, and the marriage was annulled in 1933. He left his wife a locked suitcase containing a diary detailing his homosexual adventures.

Following his mother's death in 1957, Woolrich moved in and out of various hotels in New York. Alcoholism and an amputated leg (caused by an infection from a too-tight shoe which went untreated) left him a recluse. He refused to attend the premiere of the Truffaut movie of his novel The Bride Wore Black in 1968, even though it was held in New York City. At the time of his death, he weighed 89 pounds.

He left one million dollars to Columbia for a scholarship for potential writers, in his mother's name.

Francis Nevins Jr., in his Woolrich biography First You Dream, Then You Die, rated Woolrich the fourth best crime writer of the era, behind only Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler.

Following his passing in 1968, he was interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

[edit] His Novels

Scholars generally cite his novels from 1940 to 1948 as prime Woolrich; this was when he finally made the move to writing novel-length crime fiction in contrast to his first six works, which are said to have been very much influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction.

There also exist fragments of an unfinished novel called The Loser; most of these have appeared before in various places but were most recently collected in Tonight, Somewhere in New York.


  • Cover Charge (1926)
  • Children of the Ritz (1927)
  • Times Square (1929)
  • A Young Man's Heart (1930)
  • The Time of Her Life (1931)
  • Manhattan Love Song (1932)


  • The Bride Wore Black (1940)
  • The Black Curtain (1941)
  • The Black Alibi (1942)
  • Phantom Lady (1942, as William Irish)
  • The Black Angel (1943, based on his 1935 story Murder in Wax)
  • The Black Path of Fear (1944)
  • Deadline at Dawn (1944, as William Irish)
  • Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945, as George Hopley)
  • Waltz into Darkness (1947, as William Irish) (2001 film Original Sin)
  • Rendezvous in Black (1948)
  • I Married a Dead Man (1948, as William Irish)


  • Savage Bride (1950)
  • Fright (1950, as George Hopley)
  • Marihuana (1951)
  • You'll Never See Me Again (1951)
  • Strangler's Serenade (1951, as William Irish)
  • Hotel Room (1958)
  • Death is My Dancing Partner (1959)
  • The Doom Stone (1960, previously serialized in Argosy 1939)
  • Into the Night (1987, an unfinished manuscript finished by Lawrence Block)

[edit] Selected films based on Woolrich stories

[edit] Trivia

The pseudonym William Irish may be an oblique reference to Samuel William Henry Ireland, a notorious forger of "original" Shakespeare manuscripts.

[edit] External Links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../c/o/r/Cornell_Woolrich_2639.html"