Director-screenwriter Quentin Tarantino (1963–) became the talk of the movie industry with the release of Reservoir Dogs (1992), the occasionally brilliant but unrelentingly violent saga of some crude, foul-mouthed criminals who come together to pull off a robbery. He solidified his stardom with Pulp Fiction (1994), a brazenly hip film that became one of the most praised and popular movies of the 1990s. Pulp Fiction is named for the sensationalistic crime novels and pulp magazines (see entry under 1930s—Print Culture in volume 2) whose prime years came between the 1920s and 1950s. While regarded as popular-culture throwaways at the time of their publication, they were inspiring a new type of American literature: dark, shocking depictions of crime in the shadowy city, often featuring cynical, determined detective heroes. The most famous practitioners of pulp fiction—among them Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), and Jim Thompson (1906–1977)—became legendary twentieth-century American writers.

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