Richard Edward Connell Biography

Richard Connell was born October 17, 1893, in Duchess County near the Hudson River in New York State—not far from Theodore Roosevelt's homestead. At the age of ten, he started writing for the Poughkeepsie News-Press, his father's newspaper, as a baseball reporter. Later, while attending Georgetown College in Washington D.C., Richard served as secretary to his father in Congress. Following his father's death in 1912, Connell enrolled at Harvard University where he served as editor for both the Daily Crimson and the Lampoon. After Harvard, Connell went to work for the New York American, a newspaper in New York City. He also served with American forces in World War I. In 1925, following the publication of "The Most Dangerous Game," which won him the O'Henry Memorial Award for short fiction, Connell moved to Beverly Hills, California, where he continued his career as a freelance writer.

Richard Connell was one of the most prolific short story writers of the early-twentieth-century, writing more than three hundred stories, many of which were published in popular magazines of the day, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. His most widely known story is "The Most Dangerous Game," which has been in print continuously since 1924. Many of his stories were published in three collections: The Sin of Monsieur Petipon (1922), Apes and Angels (1924), and Ironies (1930). Though Connell did not...

Richard Connell was a prolific writer in the first several decades of the twentieth century. He was born October 17, 1893, in a New York state community near the Hudson River, not far from Theodore Roosevelt's homestead. He started his writing career early, working as a reporter for the Poughkeepsie News-Press while still in high school. He spent a year at Georgetown College (now University) in Washington, D.C. while working as a secretary for his father, who was a member of Congress. When his father died in 1912, Connell moved back East to attend Harvard University. There he exercised his interest in writing by serving as an editor for both the Daily Crimson and the Lampoon, a precursor to the popular National Lampoon satire magazine. Around this time he also worked as a reporter for the New York American newspaper and served in World War I.

Throughout his career, Connell variously wrote novels, plays, short stories, and screenplays for Hollywood movies. Among the screenplays he wrote are Seven Faces and Brother Orchid, a mob tale starring Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. Most of Connell's fiction was published in the 1920s and 1930s, including the novels Mad Lover, Playboy, and What Ho! He was a prolific fiction writer. His stories, more than 300 in all, were frequently published in such popular magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Many of these...