PCL MS 228 Sid Graedon Collection on Mickey Spillane

Sid Graedon was a marketing executive at New American Library, who published Mickey Spillane's work in paperback from the 1960s on. The two men enjoyed a lasting friendship, and over many years, Spillane gifted these original manuscripts to his friend which, no doubt, is the reason they still exist, as during his lifetime Spillane lost one home to fire and another to Hurricane Hugo.

Frank Morrison Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 9, 1918.  “Mickey,” as he is better known, was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey where he attended Erasmus Hall High School, the place where he would cultivate his writing talents. 

Spillane's earliest published writing was for comic books. Encouraged by his friends Joe and Ray Gill, in 1940 Spillane began writing for Funnies, Inc., a comic packager that provided content for companies such as Timely Comics, which later became Marvel.

Spillane enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but remained stateside, becoming a fighter pilot and then flight instructor until the end of World War II.

Spillane began his literary career with I, the Jury, his first novel. He later said that he wrote the book to try and afford a summer house.  While initial hardcover sales were disappointing, its paperback counterpart was a smash hit. Domestically, Spillane’s first effort sold over 6 million copies.  While reprints and foreign editions make an exact count difficult, most conservative sales estimates of Spillane's career output top 200 million copies. 

Spillane’s personal journey, as well as his folklore sometimes make it hard to separate his life from that of ‘Mike Hammer,’ the heroic protagonist in many of his novels. Spillane even appeared as Hammer in one of the film adaptations of his work, The Girl Hunters.

Embracing controversy as a selling point, the covers of Spillane’s hard-boiled crime fiction often contained scantily-clad women.  Despite overwhelming success as an author, Spillane’s novels were often panned by critics for their violent content and mass appeal.  Spillane reveled in such critical abuse, and the negative reviews would often be prominently featured in advertisements, next to the extraordinary sales numbers for the book.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Spillane was more in demand for his persona than his writing. He appeared in spisodes of Columbo, and was one of the lynch pins of the "Tastes Great, Less Filling" Miller Lite ad campaign that lasted for nearly 20 years.

Mickey Spillane died on July 17, 2006 in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, his home for many years.

Additional materials, including promotional posters and ephemera, have yet to be processed but will be added to the inventory when they are complete.