The Man with the Golden Arm

Nelson Algren was an American writer. He wrote his first story in 1933 while he was in Texas working at a gas station. Before returning home one evening, he was caught stealing a typewriter from an abandoned classroom. For this, he spent nearly five months behind bars. The incident made a deep impression on him. It enhanced his identification with outsiders, has-beens, and the general failures that later populated his fictional world. His novel, The Man With The Golden Arm won the National Book Award in 1950. The novel tells the story of Frankie Machine, an addict who gets clean while in prison. This complex tale takes place in mid-century Chicago and explores the circumstances that led to Frankie’s addiction as well as the stories of the community of swindlers, tenement housing dwellers, and drunks that he takes up with. As his life spirals downward, Frankie does not believe that he is worth saving. One of Algren’s accomplishments is that he has the reader cheering for Frankie, and his friends as well. A relentless evocation of life in the inner-city, its victims and survivors.

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