A Swell-Looking Babe

American novelist and screenwriter Jim Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma on September 27, 1906. In Fort Worth, Texas during prohibition, he worked as a bellboy at the Hotel Texas for two years where he earned up to $300 a week by supplying hotel patrons with bootleg liquor, heroin, and marijuana. During the Depression, he worked with the Oklahoma Federal Writers Project and was a member of the Communist Party from 1935 to 1938.

During World War II, he worked at an aircraft factory where he was investigated by the FBI for his Communist Party affiliation. His first novel, Now and on Earth, was published in 1942. He wrote more than thirty novels during his lifetime and most of them were paperback pulp crime novels. His best known works are The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman, and Pop. 1280.

In 1955, he moved to Hollywood, California to write screenplays with Stanley Kubrick. Thompson helped write The Killing and Paths of Glory. He died after a series of strokes in Los Angeles, California on April 7, 1977. His long-time alcoholism and recent self-inflicted starvation contributed to his death. His death attracted little attention because none of his novels were in print in the U.S. at that time.

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