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 an ...