Michael Arlen (1895-1956)

This invited long chapter provides an in-depth introduction to the British-Armenian writer’s life and work and represented the first new work on Arlen (1895-1956) for a number of decades.

Michael Arlen is probably one of the most successful authors modern readers have never heard of: a best-selling novelist and short-story writer throughout the 1920s, he is now best remembered—if at all—as a dandylike figure, who captured the cosmopolitan sophistication of the jazz age with his 1924 novel, The Green Hat. Bulgarian by birth, and Armenian by nationality—his birth name was Dikran Kouyoumdjian—he became a naturalized British citizen in the early 1920s, changing his name to Michael Arlen at the same time. Active throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he published a total of nine novels, five collections of short stories, and countless magazine short stories and essays. The best-known of his works, The Green Hat, was one of the best-selling novels of 1924 in both Europe and North America and was turned into a hugely popular Broadway play—as well as being filmed twice (once with Greta Garbo, in 1928, as A Woman of Affairs, and again in 1934, as Outcast Lady).

The success of The Green Hat's various incarnations made Arlen a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic; he appeared in the press almost daily for most of the 1920s, the reading public apparently unable to hear enough about his clothing, travel, latest utterances, and—especially—love life. However, with the end of the decade, Arlen's success began to wane; a world shattered by the 1929 stock market crash, and again preoccupied with the possibility of war, had less appetite for Arlen's brand of apparently frivolous escapism. Perhaps sensing this—and no doubt also responding to these same anxieties—Arlen, like many of his literary contemporaries in the 1930s, turned to political fiction. This won him a few admirers, but he never again achieved the popularity of his earlier works, and his celebrity gradually faded over the next few decades. Having moved from London to Cannes in the late 1920s, and then back to London at the start of World War II, he ultimately moved to New York in 1941, where he lived until his death from lung cancer on June 23, 1956.