York World, The American Magazine and The Baltimore Sun. With the publication of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain was instantly hailed as the foremost American writer in the hard-boiled genre. An "ecstatic" review by Franklin P. Adams in the New York Herald served to alert critics to Cain's achievement. The novel elicited high praise from literary critics in the US and abroad, and proved to be a perennial best-seller: "When the book appeared it caused a sensation." Cain was appalled when his work was described as the "quintessence" of the "hard-boiled" genre and the author labeled the preeminent "tough-guy" writer. He emphatically rejected these characterizations of his writing. The arresting first sentence of the novel begins "They threw me off the haytruck about noon..." and was widely remarked upon. The early passages of the novel have been cited in journals and studied in college writing courses since the novel appeared. Biographer David Madden notes that the opening passages showcase Cain's narrative skill: "The compression, the swift execution of the basic situation [in the first pages] are typical of the entire novel." Cain's virtues as a novelist have not been uniformly lauded. Biographer Paul Skenazy noted that the Postman suffered from "simplistic psychological portraits, some mannered writing [and] inconsistencies in the time frame and plot structures...". Critic Walter Wells in his analysis of Hollywood fiction argued that the "Postman remains a forced, structurally imperfect work [pandering] shamelessly to subliterary taste." Literary critic Edmund Wilson cautioned that the story is "always in danger of becoming unintentionally funny." Biographer Roy Hoopes noted that "After reading…Cain's light fiction, you cannot help but wonder whether the comic scenes in Postman were really unintentional." The fame of The Postman Always Rings Twice prompted parodies: humorist James Thurber, who had worked with Cain at The New Yorker in the early 1930s, offered a burlesque of the first sentence of the novel which opens: "They kicked me out of college when I was about twenty-seven…" Hoopes regards The Post Always Rings Twice as "that rarest of literary achievements—a best-seller widely acclaimed by the critics." Plot and theme origins Two sources informed Cain's plot inventions for The Postman Always Rings Twice. In California during the early 1930s, he frequented a gas station operated by a buxom woman who pumped his gas. Cain described his encounters with her: Cain discovered the dramatic component he required for the story in