In response to:

Dashiell Hammett: A Memoir from the November 25, 1965 issue

To the Editors:

…I have just caught up with The New York Review for Nov. 25, with [Lillian Hellman’s] memoir of Dashiell Hammett. The usual adjective is moving. which I certainly found it to be, but it was also thorough, beautifully written, funny, genuinely tragic, and wonderfully frank and loyal. It’s by far the best writing in print about him, and makes a fine portrait-in-depth of a kind too rare in this or any other time.

Carlos Baker

Department of English,

Princeton University

This Issue

March 3, 1966