Cornell Woolrich was a short-story writer, novelist and screenwriter who we consider to be one of the world's greatest writers. Woolrich was born in 1903 and spent his childhood in revolutionary Mexico. He was briefly married to Gloria Blackton, but the marriage was annulled and never consummated. He lived out the last few decades of his life in a suite at the Hotel Marseilles with his mother Claire Woolrich, who predeceased him in 1957. A closeted homosexual, Woolrich left his wife a diary of his sexual exploits with men.

Although Woolrich started out as a mainstream writer in the tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was forced to turn to pulp magazines to survive the Great Depression of the 1920's. This necessity, and his life of deep despair and personal terrors, required him to alter his writing style to brooding, dark suspense. Woolrich became a prolific pulp writer from 1934-46, turning out scores of material, including 12 suspense novels. His best-known literary work is "Rear Window", adapted by Alfred Hitchcock to the classic motion picture starring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. He is regarded as the father of what has come to be known as "Noir" or "Film Noir". His black suspense dramas were extremely popular in the 1940s and 1950s and are considered classics by literary historians.

Woolrich had a remarkable gift for prose, excelling in description. His ability to bring to life what would ordinarily be viewed as mundane is unsurpassed in his genre of writing. Many wonder how a man who described himself as a recluse had enough life experiences to masterfully describe the many settings used in his vast collection of writing. Woolrich remains a true American icon, having helped create a literary tradition which remains popular today. He died in New York City in 1968.

Woolrich's literary legacy includes 200 novels, novellas and short stories, many written for the leading pulp magazines, often under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. From these works 88 feature films, television movies and television series episodes have been made, including:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954) starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, based on Woolrich's short story of the same name
• François Truffaut’s MISSISSIPPI MERMAID (1969) starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve, based on “Waltz into Darkness”
• THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1968) starring Jeanne Moreau
• The American film noir classics UNION CITY, CONVICTED, I’M DANGEROUS TONIGHT, I WOULDN’T BE IN YOUR SHOES, NIGHTMARE, PHANTOM LADY, and NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES
• Woolrich has also been adapted into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, and Turkish language feature films

Per crime noir expert Otto Penzler,

“His characters are shades of grey. People with whom we empathize choose to murder…Policemen, the upholders of the law, are frequently fascistic thugs who enjoy torturing suspects.”

“Pretty girls with faces of angels turn out to be liars and cheats, and often worse…A Woolrich character often still faces a future barren of love, joy or hope at the end of a story”.

The title of Francis M. Nevins, Jr. definitive biography on Woolrich says it all: FIRST YOU DREAM, THEN YOU DIE.