Arlen, Michael

▪ British author

original name  Dikran Kouyoumdjian  

born Nov. 16, 1895, Ruse, Bulg.

died June 23, 1956, New York, N.Y., U.S.

      British author whose novels and short stories epitomized the brittle gaiety and underlying cynicism and disillusionment of fashionable post-World War I London society.

      The son of an Armenian merchant, Arlen was brought up in England, to which his father had escaped to avoid Turkish persecution. By 1916 he was living in London, enjoying the company of such writers as D.H. Lawrence and George Moore and writing articles for periodicals and journals. He took the name Michael Arlen in 1922, when he became a British subject, and wrote two books of short stories before his first novel, “Piracy” (1922), was published. His best-known work was published two years later; the phenomenal popular success of The Green Hat (1924)—a witty, sophisticated, but fundamentally sentimental novel about the “bright young things” of Mayfair, London's most fashionable romantic district of the period—made him famous almost overnight in Great Britain and the United States.

      After 1928, when he married the Countess Atalanta Mercati, Arlen lived mainly in the south of France. Though he was for a time much celebrated, Arlen never repeated the popular success of The Green Hat, which had been adapted for both stage (starring Tallulah Bankhead) and screen (as A Woman of Affairs, starring Greta Garbo). He wrote a screenplay, The Heavenly Body (1944), and a number of books, including Man's Mortality (1933) and the thriller The Flying Dutchman (1939), before retiring to New York City in 1945.

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