Trivia

He never lived to see "The Night Of The Hunter" (1955), the film of perhaps his best screenplay. He died in the back of a New York taxi some four months before its opening. After his death, the director of the film, Charles Laughton, sent his widow a telegram simply saying, "I loved him".

He was also a film critic, and wrote for several magazines, including "Time". He sometimes reviewed the same film for more than one of those magazines, writing a completely new review each time rather than simply re-publishing the same one. His evolving opinions on these films can be gathered from these reviews. Among his most famous are the several he wrote for Laurence Olivier's film version of Henry V (1944) before and after the British film opened in the U.S. in 1946, and the several he wrote championing Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which was then receiving a very hostile reaction from audiences, who had no desire to see Chaplin playing a wife-murderer.

Loved the films of Charles Chaplin, and championed some of Chaplin's then-underappreciated work.

Posthumous Pulitzer Prize, 1958.

He was buried on his farm in Hillsdale, New York, USA.

Once lived at 172 Bleecker Street (between MacDougal & Avenue of the Americas) in Manhattan's Greenwich Village district during the 1940s and 1950s.

Once hung calmly out a 52nd-story window in New York City's Chrysler Building.

Engineered tryst between his best friend and second wife.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 7-11. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 1005.