Ss van dine biography examples
•
Willard Huntington Wright was born to Archibald Davenport Wright and Annie Van Vranken Wright on October 15, 1887, in Charlottesville. He attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College, and Harvard University. He also studied art in Munich and Paris, an apprenticeship that led to a job as literary and art critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 1912 to 1914, he edited "The Smart Set," a New York literary magazine, and continued writing as a critic and reporter until 1923, when he became ill from overwork. His doctor confined him to bed because of a heart ailment for more than two years. In frustration, he began collecting thousands of volumes of brott and detection. In 1926, all this work paid off with the publication of his first "S.S. Van Dine" novel, "The Benson Murder Case." He went on to write 11 more, and his aristocratic amateur sleuth, Philo Vance (who shares a love of aesthetics like Wright), was so popular that Wright became wealthy for the
•
by Carol Westron
S.S. Van Dine is the pseudonym used by Willard Huntington Wright when writing detective novels. For the larger proportion of his life he lived, worked and wrote as Wright. His work as a critic, editor and literary writer was not only different from his later work and life as a writer of detective stories, for the major part of his life he actively despised and disparaged detective stories and other commercial genres. For this reason, I have decided to call him by his real name, Wright, until the point in his life when he became a writer of detective stories and adopted the pseudonym Van Dine.
Willard Wright was born in Virginia, but was brought up in California, where his father owned a hotel. He was educated at St. Vincent College, Pomona University and Harvard University, but failed to graduate. In 1907, when he was just nineteen, he married Katherine Belle Boynton and they had a daughter, Beverley. The marriage swiftly failed and the couple
•
S. S. Van Dine
Van Dine was a writer who wrote detective novels. ‘S.S. Van Dine’ is actually a pseudonym. He was born Willard Huntington Wright. He created the fictional detective Philo Vance, a sleuth and aesthete who first appeared in books in the 1920s, then in films and on the radio.
Born to Archibald Davenport Wright and Annie Van Vranken Wright on October 15 1888, Van Dine grew up in his brother’s shadow. His brother, Stanton, was a respected painter; one of the first American abstract artists. Willard was however was more humble in his strength. He was a self-taught writer, attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College, and Harvard University, but did not graduate.
At age 21, Wright began his professional writing career as literary editor of the Los Angeles Times, where – describing himself as "'Esthetic expert and psychological shark". He wrote book reviews for the newspaper. For romance and detective fiction in particular, he was especially brutal.
Van Dine died on