Books by Robert Polito

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest

by Dashiell Hammett, Robert Polito

The three classic novels published here in one volume are rich with the crisp prose, subtle characters, and intricate plots that made Dashiell Hammett one of the most admired writers of the twentieth century.

A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett virtually invented the hard-boiled crime novel. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, tangles with a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. The Thin Man introduces Hammett's wittiest creations, Nick and Nora Charles, who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. And in Red Harvest, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective, the Continental Op, takes on the entire town of Poisonville in a deadly war against corruption.

"Dashiell Hammett is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer."—Boston Globe

”Hammett was spare, hard-boiled, but he did over and over what only the best writers can ever do. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”—Raymond Chandler

”Hammett’s prose was clean and entirely unique. His characters were as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction.”—The New York Times

”As a novelist of realistic intrigue, Hammett was unsurpassed in his own or any time.”—Ross Macdonald

”Dashiell Hammett’s dialogues can be compared only with the best in Hemingway.”—André Gide

”Hammett is one of the best contemporary American writers.”—Gertrude Stein

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

by Robert Polito

Robert Polito recounts Thompson's relationship with his father, a disgraced Oklahoma sheriff, with the women he adored in life and murdered on the page, with alcohol, would-be censors, and Hollywood auteurs. Unrelenting and empathetic, casting light into the darker caverns of our collective psyche, Savage Art is an exemplary homage to an American original. A National Book Critics Circle Award winner. 57 photos.

After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

by Robert Polito

A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s in a haze of substance abuse, made arguably the worst music of his career, and was finally put to bed in the 1980s--only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan's concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative. That is not this story.

Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, After the Flood reveals Dylan's output during the last three decades as his most ambitious yet. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since the early 1990s, celebrated poet Robert Polito shows how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has embodied and resisted its era--interweaving Ovid and Americana, film noir and the Civil War. Imaginatively researched, After the Flood is both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga.

Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s: The Killer Inside Me / The Talented Mr. Ripley / Pick-up / Down There / The Real Cool Killers (Library of America)

by Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, Robert Polito, Chester Himes

This adventurous two-volume collection presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life. The raw power of their vernacular style has profoundly influenced contemporary American culture and writing.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.