Michael  Arlen was born in 1895 as Dikran Kouyoumdjian in Bulgaria to Armenian  parents. At the age of four, he moved to England. After abandoning his medical studies, he settled in London, where he moved in fashionable circles and enjoyed a reputation as a modern-day arbiter elegantiarum. His literary breakthrough came in 1924 with The Green Hat,  a novel that brought him instant fame and established him as a cult figure of the Roaring Twenties. He married Countess Atalanta Mercati of  Greece, with whom he had two children, including the future writer Michael J. Arlen. Following the Second World War, he lived in Hollywood  and New York, where he died of cancer in 1956 at the age of sixty.