David Goodis

David Goodis was born in Philadelphia on March 2, 1917, the child of an immigrant father and a first-generation American mother determined to give him a middle-class upbringing and college education. Despite his relative privilege, Goodis was determined from the get-go to sympathize with the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the outsider, embracing the language of noir as a vehicle for social criticism even as he focused on portraying human foibles. Ever conscious of his Jewish identity, he lived through the peak of anti-Semitism in the US (which cut off abruptly in public life during WWII, but has remained an undercurrent in American life to the present day), and his defeated and fatigued characters have as much in common with Old World Jewish literature as they do figures in noir. He also lived and loved in a segregated city, rejecting potential happiness with black girlfriends so as to not upset his parents, whose own outsider status certainly didn’t preclude prejudice against others. He ventured forth to Skid Row and wandered around slums, transforming his observations into noir fantasies.

Photographs of Goodis reflect a nervous, rumpled character—he’s handsome, but he’s torn. He’s not going to do anything, but then again, he’s not going to look away, either. When I look at pictures of Goodis, I see myself in him. Not in his beautifully wrought sentences or cutting observations. But in his need to witness, and his refusal to smooth his shirt.

After getting a degree in journalism in 1938, Goodis worked briefly in advertising while also writing for the pulps. His first few books never took off, but 1946’s Dark Passage, both as a book and a quickly adapted film, brought Goodis to the fore of American noir writing. Throughout the 1940s, he split his time between New York City (where he wrote for the pulps) and Hollywood (where he wrote for the studios), before burning out and returning to Philadelphia in 1950. There, he would reside, taking care of his schizophrenic brother and aging parents, and churning out the decade’s most depressing pulp fiction, until his death at age 49 on January 7, 1967. He died of a stroke while shoveling snow, possibly caused by his resistance to an armed robbery a few days earlier.