A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

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I was only trying to cheat death. I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me.

I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone. To stay in the light, to be with the living a little while past my time.

— Cornell Woolrich

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born in New York City on December 4, 1903, but lived his early years in Mexico until his parents separated; and eventually divorced. Shortly thereafter, Woolrich and his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich, moved back to America.

He attended Columbia University but left in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, Cover Charge, was published. Cover Charge was one of six Jazz Age novels inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Woolrich is best known for penning the short story, “It had to Be Murder” [which is loosely-based on H. G. Wells’ short story “Through a Window”], that Alfred Hitchcock based the film, Rear Window on. In 1990, ownership of the copyright in Woolrich’s original story “It Had to Be Murder” and its use for Rear Window was litigated before the United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207.

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