Not to be confused with John D. MacDonald Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar . He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in... his fiction has its roots in his youth. In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970. He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar.
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