Saturday, August 3, 2019
James Mallahan Cains Life :: Biography Biographies Essays
James Mallahan Cain's Life       James Mallahan Cain was born in Annapolis, as the son of an educator and      an opera singer. He studied at Washington College, in Chesterton,      Maryland, earning his B.A. at the age of eighteen, and masters in 1917.      In the same year the United States had declared war on Germany in April of      1917, and Cain registered for the draft. After serving in World War I,      Cain returned to Baltimore where he began working as a reporter. He first      worked for the Baltimore American and then for the Baltimore Sun until      1923. After a time in New York, Cain moved to Hollywood. From 1932 to      1947 Cain lived in Southern California writing for films, but did not have      much success and he drank too much. When turning to fiction Cain did find      greater success.       Cain wrote novels of crime, sex, and betrayal. The majority of his plots      follow the same predictable plan: A man falls for a woman, becomes      involved in criminal activity with the woman, and is eventually betrayed      by the woman. His subject was to be a woman who uses men to gain her      ends, and he imagined his theme in the figure of Mildred Pierce, a      housewife who becomes a successful restaurateur. Then this theme of a      woman asserting her power through men is given several curious twists by      Cain's particular imaginative preoccupations. The novel develops and      extends the strong association in Cain's earlier works between food,      finance, and mothering. And what began as the story of a woman's relation      to men and to business becomes a story of Mildred Pierce's relations to      her daughter Veda, and Veda's unscrupulous use of her mother to advance      her own operatic ambitions and satisfy her own sexual needs. If one is to      judge from the fiction, Cain seems to have been emotionally ambivalent      toward both parents. There are almost no happy families in his works.
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