Jim Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. After an itinerant childhood during which his sheriff father was driven from office for embezzlement; and as a roughneck in the Texan oil fields of the 1920s, Thompson became successful as a writer with the pulp fiction houses of the 1950s, writing a dozen of his more enduring novels in just 19 months. He also wrote two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory).