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.