David Goodis

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David Goodis started out with great promise, only to see a promising career turn into a slide to oblivion. He got off to a good start - his second novel, Dark Passage was made into a successful movie - before his personal decline, but was able to mine his experience to produce some of the best fiction of the 1950s.

After the success of Passage, Goodis became more and more eccentric, eventually moving from Hollywood to his native Philadephia to live with his parents. Having given up his dreams and dropped out of society, he began to write about life's losers, those who become dropouts themselves.

The lives of Goodis' protagonists tended to mirror his own: early promise, squandered. Unlike other noir, in which circumstance or fate did in the main character, Goodis' characters were undermined by flaws in their nature. They had talent, they had a chance, but they just couldn't come through, and settled into a less demanding and less rewarding life.

Women in this novel tend to mirror this theme of unattainable perfection and all-too-easily obtained squalor. Goodis' men are drawn to angelic, virginal women, who are sexually unavailable for a variety of reasons. These characters end up with earthy, extremely physical women, demanding women who drive the relationship with a determination that the men rarely muster.

Despite the intensely personal nature of Goodis' work and its strong, depressing content, his books were popular, especially in the early fifties. Cassidy's Girl sold over a million copies. His star dimmed as his career went on, however, and his long slide into alchoholism and obscurity ended in 1967, when he died at the age of 49.