Portrait of Michael Arlen

Michael Arlen

Bulgarian-born British writer

Lived
1895–1956

Updated September 2026

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About Michael Arlen

Michael Arlen was an essayist, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and scriptwriter. He had his greatest successes in the 1920s while living and writing in England, publishing the best-selling novel The Green Hat in 1924. Arlen is most famous for his satirical romances set in English smart society, but he also wrote gothic horror and psychological thrillers, for instance "The Gentleman from America", which was filmed in 1948 as The Fatal Night, and again in 1956 as a television episode for Alfred Hitchcock's TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Near the end of his life, Arlen mainly occupied himself with political writing. Arlen's vivid but colloquial style "with unusual inversions and inflections with a heightened exotic pitch" came to be known as 'Arlenesque'.

Biography from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Authors like Michael Arlen

Sources: book lists and dates from Wikidata and Open Library, ratings from Open Library readers, free texts from Project Gutenberg. Last updated September 2026.