Evan Hunter
Evan Hunter (born Salvatore Albert Lombino; October 15, 1926 – July 6, 2005) was an American author of crime and mystery fiction. He is best known as the author of 87th Precinct novels, published under the pen name Ed McBain, which are considered staples of police procedural genre.
Evan Hunter
Salvatore Albert Lombino[1]
October 15, 1926
New York City, U.S.
July 6, 2005 (aged 78)
Weston, Connecticut, U.S.
John Abbott, Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, Ezra Hannon, Ed McBain, Richard Marsten, others
- Novelist
- short story writer
- screenwriter
1951–2005
Crime fiction, mystery fiction, pornography, science fiction
87th Precinct series
Anita Melnick, 1949 (divorced)
Mary Vann Finley, 1973 (divorced)
Dragica Dimitrijevic, 1997 (until his death)
3 sons; 1 stepdaughter
His other notable works include The Blackboard Jungle, a semi-autobiographical novel about life in a troubled inner-city school, which was adapted into a hit 1955 film of the same name. He also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds, based on the Daphne du Maurier short story.
Hunter, who legally adopted that name in 1952, also used the pen names John Abbott, Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, Ezra Hannon and Richard Marsten, among others.
Life[edit]
Early life[edit]
Salvatore Lombino was born and raised in New York City. He lived in East Harlem until age 12, when his family moved to the Bronx. He attended Olinville Junior High School (later Richard R. Green Middle School #113), then Evander Childs High School (now Evander Childs Educational Campus), before winning a New York Art Students League scholarship. Later, he was admitted as an art student at Cooper Union. Lombino served in the United States Navy during World War II and wrote several short stories while serving aboard a destroyer in the Pacific. However, none of these stories was published until after he had established himself as an author in the 1950s.
After the war, Lombino returned to New York and attended Hunter College, where he majored in English and psychology, with minors in dramatics and education, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1950.[2] He published a weekly column in the Hunter College newspaper as "S.A. Lombino". In 1981, Lombino was inducted into the Hunter College Hall of Fame, where he was honored for outstanding professional achievement.[3]
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 1950. This experience would later form the basis for his novel The Blackboard Jungle (1954), written under the pen name Evan Hunter, which was adapted into the film Blackboard Jungle (1955).
In 1951, Lombino took a job as an executive editor for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, working with authors such as Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, Richard S. Prather, and P.G. Wodehouse. He made his first professional short story sale the same year, a science-fiction tale titled "Welcome, Martians!", credited to S. A. Lombino.[4]
Name change and pen names[edit]
Soon after his initial sale, Lombino sold 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 Hunt Collins was derived from Hunter College.) Lombino legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in May 1952, after an editor told him that a novel he wrote would sell more copies if credited to Evan Hunter than to S. A. Lombino. Thereafter, he used the name Evan Hunter both personally and professionally.