Eliott Paul

Elliot Harold Paul was an American journalist and writer. After World War I, Paul had already seen three of his novels published when he left America to be part of the literary set in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France. There, he worked for a time at the Chicago Tribune's International Edition (so-called Paris Edition), before joining Eugene and Maria Jolas as co-editor of the literary journal, transition.

Paul returned to the newspaper business, to the Paris Herald and to write more novels in his spare time. He had completed three more books when he suffered from a nervous breakdown and abruptly left Paris to recuperate in Ibiza. Caught in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, he was inspired to write the well-received Life and Death of a Spanish Town. Forced to flee Spain, he returned to Paris and produced detective fiction featuring the amateur sleuth Homer Evans, as well as his best received work, The Last Time I Saw Paris.

Back in the United States following the outbreak of World War II, Paul turned to screenwriting where in Hollywood, between 1941 and 1953, he participated in the writing of ten screenplays, the most remembered of which is the 1945 production, Rhapsody in Blue; he also wrote the screenplay for the Poverty Row production of New Orleans, a fictional history of Storyville jazz featuring Billie Holiday in her only acting role. He also contributed to London Town (1946), one of the most infamous flops in British cinema history. In 1949 he provided subtitles for the US release of Claude Autant-Lara's film Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au corps).

He wrote nine Homer Evans books.