A Young Man's Heart

by Cornell Woolrich

For the first time since 1930 this early semi-autobiographical novel by Cornell Woolrich is available. It's a tale of love and betrayal in the exotic climes of Mexico in the early 20th century. In an introduction, Francis M. Nevins, the world's foremost authority on Woolrich, tells the fascinating story of how this book came to be.

152 pages, Paperback

Published July 24, 2010

About the author

Cornell Woolrich is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s finest writer of pure suspense fiction. The author of numerous classic novels and short stories (many of which were turned into classic films) such as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Waltz Into Darkness, and I Married a Dead Man, Woolrich began his career in the 1920s writing mainstream novels that won him comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The bulk of his best-known work, however, was written in the field of crime fiction, often appearing serialized in pulp magazines or as paperback novels. Because he was prolific, he found it necessary to publish under multiple pseudonyms, including "William Irish" and "George Hopley" [...] Woolrich lived a life as dark and emotionally tortured as any of his unfortunate characters and died, alone, in a seedy Manhattan hotel room following the amputation of a gangrenous leg. Upon his death, he left a bequest of one million dollars to Columbia University, to fund a scholarship for young writers.

Source: [http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books_bi...]

Reviews

[Mohamed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written with a tragic ending. As expected, the Woolrich story protagonist is a man destined for agonizing misery, capable of challenging his circumstances but shackled by his own psyche. The story offers remorse, but as sad as it is, the prose is beautiful, and poetic without distracting from the flow of the plot.

It's similar to Hotel Room, in that each chapter is part of the young man's life story with a focus on his love life, and not only romantic love, but also motherly love, and how his fate and actions lead him to lose all the women he cared for, including two of them at the very last chapter.

I come back to Woolrich because of the elegance of his prose, and how his writing strums on emotional depths we rarely find elsewhere. Worth reading.