James Mallahan Cains Life :: Biography Biographies Essays

pack Mallahan Cains 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 identical year the get together 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 sentence in New York, Cain moved to Hollywood. From 1932 to 1947 Cain lived in Southern California create verbally for films, but did not have much success and he drank as well 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 convolute 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 field 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 disposed several curious twists by Cains particular imaginative preoccupations. The novel develops and extends the vehement association in Cains earlier works between food, finance, and mothering. And what began as the study of a womans relation to men and to business becomes a story of Mildred Pierces transaction to her daughter Veda, and Vedas 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 quick families in his works.