Nelson Algren's devastating of that savage, subterranean world go gamblers, junkies, alcoholics, prostitutes, thieves, and degenerates remains unsurpassed as an authentic portrait of human depravity.Only a master like Algren could create such a passionate and dramatic novel of so daring a theme as a man's struggle against dope addiction.THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, the bestseller on which Otto Preminger based his magnificent motion picture, is "a true novelist's triumph." -TIME

Justin Kaufman

Richard Doyle

The Man with the Golden Arm

The Man with the Golden Arm is Nelson Algren's most powerful and enduring work. On the 50th anniversary of its publication in November 1949, for which Algren was honored with the first National Book Award (which he received from none other than Eleanor Roosevelt at a ceremony in March 1950), Seven Stories is proud to release the first critical edition of an Algren work. A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems. The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm Algren's defense of the individual, while Carl Sandburg wrote of its strange midnight dignity. A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope. Special contributions by Russell Banks, Bettina Drew, James R. Giles, Carlo Rotella, William Savage, Lee Stringer, Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and others.

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