EVAN HUNTER aka ED MCBAIN
BUY EVAN HUNTER aka ED MCBAIN Books HERE:
http://experiencedbooks.com/web/abr/?asa=Ed+McBain
Evan Hunter, born Salvatore Albert Lombino (October 15, 1926 – July 6, 2005), was a prolific American author and screenwriter. Though he was a successful and well-known writer using the Evan Hunter name (a name he legally adopted in 1952), he was perhaps even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime-oriented fiction beginning in 1956.
Evan Hunter was born and raised as Salvatore Lombino in New York City.Lombino served in the navy in WWII, writing several early short stories while serving aboard a destroyer in the Pacific. However, none of these stories were published until after he had established himself as an author in the 1950s.
After WWII, Lombino returned to New York and studied at Hunter College, majoring in English, with minors in dramatics and education. He published a weekly column in the Hunter College newspaper as "S.A. Lombino".
While looking to start a career as a writer, Lombino took a variety of jobs, including 17 days as a teacher at Bronx Vocational High School in September of 1950. This experience would later form the basis for his 1954 novel The Blackboard Jungle.
In 1951, Lombino took a job as an Executive Editor for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, working with authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, P.G. Wodehouse, Lester del Rey, Poul Andersen and Richard S. Prather, amongst others. That same year, he made his first professional short story sale, a science-fiction tale entitled "Welcome Martians" and credited to S.A. Lombino.
Soon after his initial short story sale, Lombino started selling stories under the pen-names "Evan Hunter" and "Hunt Collins". The name "Evan Hunter" is generally believed to have been derived from two schools he attended, Evander Childs High School and Hunter College, although the author himself would never confirm that. (He did confirm that the name "Hunt Collins" was derived from Hunter College.)
Lombino legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in May of 1952, after an editor told him that a novel he wrote would sell more copies if credited to "Evan Hunter" than it would if it were credited to "S.A. Lombino". Thereafter, he used the name Evan Hunter both personally and professionally.
As Evan Hunter, he wrote books such as The Blackboard Jungle (1954), Come Winter (1973), and Lizzie (1984). He wrote the original screenplay of the 1963 film The Birds for Alfred Hitchcock.
However, Hunter also wrote a great deal of crime fiction and was advised by his agents that publishing too much fiction under the Hunter by-line, or publishing any crime fiction as Evan Hunter, might weaken his literary reputation. As a consequence, during the 1950s Hunter used the pseudonyms "Curt Cannon", "Hunt Collins" and "Richard Marsten" for much of his crime fiction. His most famous pseudonym, Ed McBain, debuted in 1956 with the first novel in the 87th Precinct crime series.
Hunter himself publicly revealed that he and McBain were one and the same person in 1958, but he still continued to use the McBain pseudonym for the next several decades -- most notably on the 87th Precinct series, and on the Matthew Hope series of novels.
By about 1960, Hunter had retired the pen-names of Cannon, Marsten and Collins. From this point on, crime novels were generally attributed to McBain and other sorts of fiction to Hunter. As well, reprints of crime-oriented stories and novels written in the 1950s (i.e. crime stories that had been originally credited to Hunter, Collins, Cannon or Marsten) were reissued under the McBain byline. Hunter stated that the division of names allowed readers to know what to expect: McBain novels had a consistent writing style, while Hunter novels had a more varied writing style.
In 2000, a novel called Candyland appeared that was credited to both Hunter and McBain. The two-part novel opened in Hunter's psychologically-based narrative voice, before switching to McBain's customary "police procedural" style.
Aside from McBain, Hunter used at least two other pseudonyms after 1960. The 1975 novel Doors was originally attributed to Ezra Hannon, before being reissued as a work by McBain, and the 1992 novel Scimitar was credited to John Abbott.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Hunter
