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David Kipen

David Kipen is the founder of Libros Schmibros, a Southern California nonprofit lending library and used bookshop. He is a regular correspondent for KPCC-FM, and is the author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (Melville House, 2006). He is the former director of literature grants and the Big Read program at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Author

Tinker Tailor Soldier Schreiber

Winter 2013 | Profiles

Dehn (pronounced “Dane”) resurrected or reinvented at least three genres given up for dead at the time: the British mystery, the Shakespeare adaptation, and the spy film. He understood a thing or two about espionage, having taught and then practiced it with distinction during World War II. Yet the hundredth anniversary of Dehn’s birth has passed without the merest hiccup of notice.

The Gay Godfather of James Bond

November 5, 2012 | Articles

Born a hundred years ago today, the poet and critic Paul Dehn trained spies, won an Oscar and, notwithstanding his long, loving co-habitation with another man, helped create the epitome of 20th-century heterosexual virility—yet even Google all but asks, “Paul who?” How could this be? What tastemakers did he offend? Did he throw a drink in Malcolm Cowley’s face, make a pass at Edmund Wilson? Hardly. His only crime was to excel at the art that dare not speak its name: Paul Dehn was a screenwriter.