Michael Arlen

Born in 1895 and known to readers as Michael Arlen, he was a novelist, essayist, short-story writer, playwright, and screenwriter of Armenian background. He wrote in a polished, fashionable style that captured the moods and manners of interwar London.

He is chiefly remembered for The Green Hat (1924), the book most often singled out as his best-known success. His work was closely associated with the glamour and restlessness of the 1920s, and for a time his name became strongly linked with sophisticated society fiction.

Arlen died in 1956, but his books still offer a vivid glimpse of the wit, surface brilliance, and social tension of the world he wrote about.