Hardboiled crime Novelist who created the private eye character Phillip Marlowe, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for Double Indemnity. Some of his most important literary works are Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953).
He traveled to Europe in his early twenties and worked for a time in the British civil Service. He gave up this line of work to become a reporter for the Daily Express and the Bristol Gazette.
He received his second Academy Award nomination for his screenplay for the 1946 film, The Blue Dahlia.
He began a love affair with Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior, in 1919. Pascal eventually left her husband, and she and Chandler married in February of 1924.
Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, was made into a classic film starring Humphrey Bogart.
