American Cool: W. R. Burnett and the Rise of Literary Noir

With most screenwriters, the work lives well after the name is forgotten. So it is with W. R. Burnett, who is all but lost in public memory, and yet the long narrative reach of this screenwriter and forgotten novelist extends to half a dozen key pop-culture tropes, especially cable drama’s dependence on tortured suburban outlaws—Tony Soprano, Walter White, Nancy Botwin. Burnett’s narrative innovations helped shape the arc of a century’s worth of popular culture, starting with his first novel, Little Caesar, a surprise bestseller in 1929 that was adapted into Hollywood’s first gangster film; together with Scarface (Burnett wrote the 1932 screenplay), these two films remain gangster boilerplate. A decade later, he helped create film noir through director John Huston’s adaptation of Burnett’s novel High Sierra and his own screenplay for Graham Greene’s This Gun for Hire. Burnett also has a solid claim to inventing the heist film with 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle, a novel-turned-noir classic (again by Huston) that even had a Blaxploitation remake a generation later, called Cool Breeze. His last screenplay was for The Great Escape, the acclaimed 1963 World War II film that established Steve McQueen as an icon of cool: His character’s nickname was “The Cooler King,” in reference to his ability to maintain his dignity and sanity even in solitary confinement (that is, even in “the cooler”). Five years later, Burnett’s last novel, The Cool Man, was a swan song for his most original contribution to American cool: the existential criminal. This admirable figure was an independent, ethical man within his own code, riveting for his contradictions, and ultimately doomed as someone who, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, lives outside the law because he assumes himself honest.

In 1927, after writing five novels and dozens of short stories—all unpublished—in his home-town of Springfield, Ohio, Burnett moved to Chicago for a change of scenery and to shake up his life. He’d been raised by small-town political operatives. His literary models were the French Realists Balzac and Maupassant—he aspired to write an American version of The Human Comedy. But the big city impressed upon him the alienation and chaos of modernity and led him to two “literary revolts,” as he termed them, through which he developed a new template of rebellion in the American arts.

His first epiphany was that American novels needed to be told and heard in the contemporary urban vernacular. “Novels were all written in a certain…literary language and [had] so much description. Well, I dumped all that out; I just threw it away. It was a revolt, a literary revolt. That was my object.” In Chicago, he worked as a hotel night clerk and heard the vitality of American working-class slang—the rich, diverse jargons of gangsters, boxers, hobos, journalists, waitresses, prostitutes, and unemployed factory workers. “I wanted to develop a style of writing based on the way American people spoke—not literary English. Of course, the fact that Chicago slang was all around me made it easy to pick up.”

Burnett’s prose reminds us—in terms of style, attack, and tempo—of what must have been the shock of Chicago’s modernity to recent immigrants and migrants up from the South. For example, here’s mob boss Sam Vettori explaining a job in the first chapter of Little Caesar: “If

ANNA SCHULEIT HABER NO. 059 TWO BROTHERS.

things go right, nobody in the place’ll know it’s been stuck up, except maybe some yaps in the lobby. Get the idea? With all them horns tooting and all that damn noise, see? All right…The manager’s a goddamn bohunk and there ain’t an ounce of fight in him. See? Scabby give me the lowdown.” Burnett described the effect the city had on him as a newcomer: “On me, an outsider, an alien from Ohio, the impact of Chicago was terrific. It seemed overwhelmingly big...