Author Description

Cornell Woolrich and Transmedia Noir uses the oeuvre of famed mystery writer Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) as an optic into the media networks of American pulp fiction and the "weird tales" (in the parlance of the time) that were a seedbed of noir. Woolrich's fiction was widely published in thriller magazines like Argosy and Black Mask, and his work was a frequent source for radio anthologies, television series, and film adaptations. Tracking the transmedia circulation of Woolrich's stories and their various adaptations allows a rethinking of film noir as part of a broader "noir mediascape" during this era. The book is the first scholarly collection of essays on Woolrich It includes two recently discovered Woolrich short stories, one of which has never been published. It features contributions from scholars working on a range of different media, as well as a short piece on the rediscovered shorts by Woolrich's biographer, Francis M. Nevins. Rob King is a professor of film and media studies at Columbia University's School of the Arts. He is the author of Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (2017) and the award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009). He is currently working on a study of adult filmmaker Radley Metzger and is coediting, with Charlie Keil, the Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema.