The Man With the Golden Arm
Nelson Algren
“He was many men and no man at all. He was a hysterical little bundle of possibilities that could never come true.”
Available as eBook
3 June 2021
This modern American classic is an unflinching look at post-war America; introduced by Irvine Welsh and afterword by Kurt Vonnegut
Frankie Machine, a veteran of the Second World War, returns to Chicago’s Northwest Side with a morphine habit. Nicknamed the ‘kid with the golden arm’, he is an aspiring drummer by day and an illicit card-dealer by night. When he finally sees a chance for redemption, hard work and success, Frankie learns that the demons that chase him are not quite ready to let go.
With honesty and compassion, Nelson Algren’s critically acclaimed novel probes the lives of the displaced and dispossessed of post-war America.
The Man With the Golden Arm won the inaugural National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted into a major motion picture starring Frank Sinatra.
“This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch …Mr Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful … Mr Algren, boy, you are good”
Ernest Hemingway
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“Powerful, grisly, antic, horrifying, poetic, compassionate … [there is] virtually nothing more that one could ask”
new York Times Book Review
“The finest American novel published since the war”
washington Post
“A classic portrayal … stylish, atmospheric and moving”
independent On Sunday
“A true novelist’s triumph”
time
Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren was born in 1909 in Detroit and lived mostly in Chicago. His life was a succession of compulsive gambling, disastrous marriages and wild extremes - ranging from Texas prisons and skid-row soup-kitchens to Hollywood parties. He also had a passionate love affair with French feminist Simone de Beauvoir while she was living with Jean-Paul Sartre.
Algren received the inaugural National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm. He died in 1981, shortly after being appointed as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
