Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903 - 1968)

Born 4 Dec 1903 in New York City, USA

Husband of Gloria Violet Virginia (Blackton) Bowers — married 6 Dec 1930 (to 1933) in Santa Ana, Orange, California, United States

Died 25 Sep 1968 at age 64 in New York, USA

Biography

Cornell Hopley-Woolrich is Notable.

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was an American novelist and short story writer who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley.

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

His first six books weren't crime fiction at all, but were Jazz Age novels inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He first started writing detective stories under pseudonyms like William Irish and George Hopley. He was a contemporary of other, more famous crime writers like Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, and his stories and novels were adapted for radio and film noir, including The Bride Wore Black (novel: 1940; film: 1968) and Night Has a Thousand Eyes (novel: 1945; film: 1948). His story "It Had to Be Murder" (1942) inspired the Hitchcock classic Rear Window (1954). But Woolrich gave up writing to care for his invalid mother, and became reclusive. By the time of his death in 1968, he had been forgotten, and his funeral was unattended.

Woolrich bequeathed his estate of about $850,000 to Columbia University, to endow scholarships, in his mother's memory, for writing students.

Sources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Woolrich

• http://writersalmanac.org/