![]() ![]() In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. ![]() This novel would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film, Harper. Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade’s partner Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the popular detective Lew Archer, the tough but humane private eye who would inhabit some twenty of his novels, in The Moving Target in 1949. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944-46, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his PhD degree in 1951. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. While doing graduate study at the University of Michigan, he completed his first novel, The Dark Storm, in 1944. He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. There he met and married the former Margaret Sturm in 1938. Born in Los Gatos, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, in 1915, Millar was raised in his parents’ native Canada, where he started college. ![]() Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of American-Canadian writer of mystery fiction and detective fiction Kenneth Millar (1915 – 1983). ![]()
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