Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Jim Thompson” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Jim Thompson

(1906 – 1977)

Thompson was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for his paperback pulp novels and his ability to enter the minds of the criminally insane. His wife protected his manuscripts and copy-rights, anticipating posthumous fame. He was proved right ten years after his death. James Meyers (Jim) Thompson was born in Oklahoma. His father James Thompson was the sheriff of Andarko, Oklahoma, who foiled jailbreaks and arrested horse thieves. In 1921 he suffered a breakdown and died in an institution 20 years later.

In the 1940s Thompson turned to crime fiction as a way of making money. Thompson published his first novel, Now And On Earth, in 1942. In it the father of the protagonist dies in an asylum, killing himself by eating the stuffing from his mattress, a fate Thompson often claimed for his own father. Thompson’s autobiography, Bad Bay, appeared in 1953 and depicts his chaotic coming of age, boodegging, and how he almost got himself beaten to death by a homicidal sheriff’s deputy. Thompson worked as a journalist for the New York Daily News and for the Los Angeles Times Mirror. In the 1950s he was blacklisted during the period of Joseph McCarthy’s “crusade” against Communists, but was later summoned to Hollywood by the director Stanley Kubrick to co-write screenplays for The Killing (1956), a downbeat movie about a robbery at a racetrack, and the anti-war film Paths of Glory (1957), set in the French trenches of Woild War I, starring Kirk Douglas and Adolphe Menjou. In Hollywood Thompson also wrote scripts for the Dr. Kildare series. Thompson’s fifth book, The Killer In-side Me (1952), made his reputation. The central character and first-person narrator is a small town sheriff Lou Ford, who pre-tends to be dim-witted, but who in fact is a cunning, complex, even brilliant madman, who plays cat and mouse with the world. Stanley Kubrick considered the book the most chilling account of a criminally warped mind he had ever encountered. Another sharply portrayed psychopath is found in The Nothing Man (1954), in which the protagonist, a newspaperman Clinton Brown, drinks and kills but cannot get himself blamed for the crimes he commits.

In the 1950s Thompson wrote nearly 20 novels. He was frequently broken and sometimes separated from his family. His problems with liquor Thompson depicts in The Alcholics. Because of his moderate success he wrote fast, and repeated himself in later works, recycling among others The Killer Inside Me again. Several of Thompson’s stories are set in the deep South, moving in the similar atmosphere of decay and the macabre as William Faulkner in his novels.