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Elmore John Leonard Jr. (born and Screenwriter . BIOGRAPHY Leonard was born in New Orleans, but his father worked as a site locator for General Motors and the family moved frequently for several years. However in 1934 the family settled in Detroit , Michigan and Leonard has made this area his home ever since. About this time, two major events occurred that would influence many of his works. Gangsters such as Bonnie And Clyde were making national headlines, as were the Detroit Tigers baseball team. In the early 1930s , Bonnie And Clyde were on their rampage, and were killed in May, 1934. The Tigers made it to the World Series in 1934. Leonard turned these events into lifelong fascinations with both sports and guns. Leonard graduated from the University Of Detroit Jesuit High School in 1943 and immediately joined the Navy where he served with the Seabees for three years in the south Pacific. In 1946 he enrolled at the University of Detroit where he pursued writing more seriously, entering his work in short story contests and sending it off to magazines. A year before he graduated he got a job as a Copy Writer for an ad agency, a position he kept for several years as he wrote on the side. He graduated in 1950 with a degree in English and Philosophy. Leonard had his first success in 1951 when Argosy published the short-story, "Trail of the Apache". During the 50's and early 60's he continued writing westerns, publishing over 30 short-stories. He wrote his first novel, "The Bounty Hunters", in 1953 and followed this with four other novels. Two of his stories were turned into movies at this time, "The Tall T" and "3:10 to Yuma". Leonard, or "Dutch" as he is sometimes called, got his first break in the fiction market during the 1950s , regularly publishing pulp Western novels. He has since forayed into Mystery , Crime , and more topical genres, as well as Screenwriting . Leonard now lives in Oakland County, Michigan , with his family. WRITING STYLE He has been commended by critics for his gritty realism and strong dialogue. His Writing Style sometimes takes liberties with grammar in the interest of speeding along the story. In his essay "Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing", Leonard wrote, "My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Also on the subject of what makes his books so readable he has said that he leaves out the parts that readers skip. {Link without Title} Leonard has been called "the Dickens of Detroit" because of his intimate portraits of people from that city. Leonard's ear for dialogue and ability to render dialogue on the printed page are uncanny and have been praised by writers such as Saul Bellow and Martin Amis . "Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy", Amis told Leonard at a Writers Guild Theatre event in Beverly Hills in 1998. {Link without Title} FILM WORK A number of Leonard's novels have been adapted as films, perhaps most notably '' Out Of Sight '', '' Get Shorty '' in 1995, and '' Rum Punch '' as the 1997 film '' Jackie Brown ''. The film Bandits was originally meant to be an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel "Bandits", to which Bruce Willis owns the film rights, but the producers felt it was too weak and brought in writer Harley Peyton to write a new script from scratch. WORK Novels
Screen Plays
Stories Short stories turned into films:
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