康奈尔·伍里奇

康奈尔·伍里奇（英语：Cornell Woolrich, 1903年12月4日—1968年9月25日），美国小说家和短篇小说作家。

许多他的作品被改编电影和电视节目。

作品

《黑色帷幕》

《黑衣新娘》

《黑天使》

Cornell George Hopley Woolrich ( WUUL-ritch; December 4, 1903 – September 25, 1968) was an American novelist and short story writer, also known under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. His biographer, Francis Nevins Jr., rated Woolrich the fourth best crime writer of his day, behind Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler.

Some of Woolrich's works have been adapted to important films. Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock is based on his short story "It Had to Be Murder" (1942), and The Bride Wore Black (1968) by François Truffaut is based on his novel of the same name (1940).

Biography

Woolrich was born in New York City. His parents separated when he was young, and he lived for a time in Mexico with his father before returning to New York to live with his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich.

He attended Columbia University, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society, but left in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, Cover Charge, was published. As Eddie Duggan observes, "Woolrich enrolled at New York's Columbia University in 1921 where he spent a relatively undistinguished year until he was taken ill and was laid up for some weeks. It was during this illness (a Rear Window–like confinement involving a gangrenous foot, according to one version of the story) that Woolrich started writing, producing Cover Charge, which was published in 1926." Cover Charge was one of his Jazz Age novels inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A second short story, "Children of the Ritz", won Woolrich the first prize of $10,000 the following year in a competition organised by College Humor and First National Pictures; this led to his working as a screenwriter in Hollywood for First National Pictures. While in Hollywood, Woolrich explored his sexuality, apparently engaging in what Francis M. Nevins Jr. describes as "promiscuous and clandestine homosexual activity" and by marrying Violet Virginia Blackton, the 21-year-old daughter of J. Stuart Blackton, one of the founders of the Vitagraph studio. Failing in both his attempt at marriage and at establishing a career as a screenwriter (the unconsummated marriage was annulled in 1933; Woolrich garnered no screen credits), Woolrich sought to resume his life as a novelist:

Although Woolrich had published six 'jazz-age' novels, concerned with the party-antics and romances of the beautiful young things on the fringes of American society, between 1926 and 1932, he was unable to establish himself as a serious writer. Perhaps because the 'jazz-age' novel was dead in the water by the 1930s when the Depression had begun to take hold, Woolrich was unable to find a publisher for his seventh novel, I Love You, Paris, so he literally threw away the typescript, dumped it in a dustbin, and re-invented himself as a pulp writer.

When he turned to pulp and detective fiction, Woolrich's output was so prolific his work was often published under one of his many pseudonyms. For example, "William Irish" was the byline in Dime Detective Magazine (February 1942) on his 1942 story "It Had to Be Murder", which was the source of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window and itself based on H.G. Wells' short story "Through a Window". François Truffaut filmed Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black and Waltz into Darkness in 1968 and 1969, respectively, the latter as Mississippi Mermaid. Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich's original story "It Had to Be Murder" and its use for Rear Window was litigated before the US Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990). Woolrich phased out the use of pseudonyms by the early 1950s, so that even though "It Had To Be Murder" was credited on initial publication to "William Irish", Rear Window credited its story on-screen to Cornell Woolrich.