Hollywood's Big Sleep.

This article presents information on the book "The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction, 1909-1959," edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane. In his letter to Erle Stanley, Raymond Chandler opines that the reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called "significant literature" will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles. He opines that when a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things.