David Goodis
| David Goodis | |
|---|---|
Goodis at an unknown date
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| Born |
March 2, 1917 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | January 7, 1967 (aged 49) |
| Pen name | David Crewe, Logan Claybourne, Lance Kermit, others |
| Occupation | novelist, screenwriter |
| Nationality | United States |
| Period | 1939–1967 |
| Genre | Noir fiction, crime fiction |
| Spouse | Elaine Astor (1943-1946) |
| Website | |
| www |
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David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 – January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair.
According to critic Dennis Drabelle, “Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.”
Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish émigré born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish émigrés. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family.
In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled "Youth Looks at Peace". As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: "The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace." Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism.
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