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The Significance. Author Burnett, impersonal, powerful, may prove to be the novelist which Ernest Hemingway once promised to be but is not yet. Little Caesar is masterly writing as well as great reporting. The story holds together toughly through many intricacies of men and motives. To answer people's questions as to why he considers it necessary or important to write authentically, seriously about U. S. gangsters, Author Burnett quotes shrewd Renaissance Reporter Macchiavelli : "You sow ripen." He hemlock, and thinks that expect to see "crime, the ears of corn Chicago brand at least ... is an indication of vitality" (TIME, June 17). As a creative writer, he is interested in all things vital, however irrelevant they may seem to the scheme of things orderly.
The Author. Aged 20 in 1920, William R. Burnett married a 20-year-old wife in Springfield, Ohio. Not rich, both worked. All his free time, all his nights and Sun days of the next seven years, Burnett spent at his desk. He wrote five novels, 50 short stories. None of them satisfied publishers or himself.
In 1927, the Burnetts went to Chicago. She got a job in an office. He worked briefly in the Marshall Field department store. Burnett seldom saw his wife those days. At night he loafed around with gangsters and pugilists. He was getting material for his sixth novel, Little Caesar, and his seventh, Iron Man, a soon-to-be-published prize-ring story. Almost 100,000 people have bought Little Caesar. So Author Burnett is no longer a part-time novelist. At his ease in Tombstone, Ariz., he is working full-time on an eighth novel, about a U. S. soldier in the Southwest in 1875.