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The Trouble in Room 519 - Money, Matricide, and Marginal Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century (Paperback)
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The Trouble in Room 519 - Money, Matricide, and Marginal Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century (Paperback)
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List price R659
Loot Price R544
Discovery Miles 5 440
You Save R115 (17%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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At approximately seven o'clock in the evening on May 7, 1950,
Gordon Malherbe Hillman filled an empty bottle with water, capped
it, and walked into his mother's room in the pair's fifth-floor
suite at Boston's luxurious Copley Plaza Hotel. He then edged up
behind the semi-invalid woman and bludgeoned her to death. Hotel
staff had planned to evict the two the following day after several
weeks of unpaid rent. Mounting debts had finally broken the
fifty-year-old Hillman, a now-struggling author of mixed success,
but it had not always been that way, as Thomas Aiello shows in his
study of the life and work of this forgotten midcentury figure. As
a youth, Hillman attended the prestigious Noble and Greenough
School near Boston. Pursuing a career as a writer, he published
several dozen pieces of short fiction and a critically acclaimed
novel, Fortune's Cup (1941). Hollywood studios purchased the rights
to two of his stories and made them into films, The Great Man Votes
(1939) and Here I Am a Stranger (1940). But Hillman remained, for
the most part, a middling magazine writer like the majority of
fiction authors working during the Depression. Although most did
not resort to acts of manic violence, Hillman's tenuous position in
literary circles, along with his gradual descent into financial
ruin, proved a far more common tale than the stories of literary
success often pored over by critics and historians of this period.
In The Trouble in Room 519: Money, Matricide, and Marginal Fiction
in the Early Twentieth Century, Aiello weaves a compelling true
crime narrative into his exploration of the economics of magazine
fiction and the strains placed on authors by the publishing
industry prior to World War II. Examining Hillman's writing as
exemplary of Depression-era popular fiction, Aiello includes eight
stories written by Hillman and originally published in prominent
midcentury American magazines, including Collier's, Liberty, and
McCall's, to provide additional context and insight into this
trying time and tragic life.
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