W. R. Burnett, author of thirty-four novels and a collaborator on screenplays for sixty motion pictures, distinguished himself by writing several prototypical works on the American underworld and gangsters. Three of his novels, Little Caesar (1929), High Sierra (1940), and The Asphalt Jungle (1949), are especially noteworthy for their powerful impact as motion pictures.

Born in Springfield, Ohio, the son of Emily Upson Colwell Morgan Burnett and Theodore Addison Burnett, he attended the local grammar and high schools, and was graduated from the Miami Military Institute at Germantown, Ohio, in 1919. He enrolled in the School of Journalism at Ohio State University, but only attended classes for one semester. At the age of twenty-one he found himself married and with no decided course in life. After working as a shop steward in a factory and as an insurance salesman, he became a statistician for Ohio's Department of Industrial Relations.

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