MUSEUM OF MODERN MYTHOLOGY AND POP CULTURE

PHILIP MARLOWE

1939. "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Raymond Chandler's iconic private investigator Philip Marlowe first appeared under that name in the 1939 novel The Big Sleep. The character of Philip Marlowe towers over the hard-boiled, noir genre begun in the 1920s, introduced to the mainstream public by Dashiell Hammett in 1929 (Red Harvest), and then later refined by Raymond Chandler. Marlowe, the wisecracking, philosophical detective is fueled by his own moral code and is the errant knight up against corruption in an indifferent, unbeatable world but not willing to give up the fight.

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