With a foreword by Kurt VonnegutAfterword by Studs Terkel"The finest American novel published since the war."Washington PostWinner of the first ever National Book Award, Nelson Algren's masterpiece is one of the truly ground-breaking novels to come out of twentieth-century America. Subsequently made into a film starring Frank Sinatra in its central role, The Man with the Golden Arm is a book of rare genius, an unforgettably sad portrait of a community and in particular its card-dealing, doomed protagonist, Frankie Machine, as he slowly cuts his own heart into wafer-thin slices.The literary critic Malcolm Cowley described the novel as "Algren's defence of the individual" and Kurt Vonnegut wrote of Algren being "a master storyteller...enchanted by the hopeless". Both appreciated the book's enormous compassion and humanity and Algren's immense skill in bringing a time and place vividly to life as will any contemporary reader of this quiet powerhouse of a novel."A classic portrayal... stylish, atmospheric and moving"Independent on Sunday"A true novelist's triumph."Time"Algren is an artist whose sympathy is as large as Victor Hugo's, an artist who ranks, with this novel, among ourbest American authors."Chicago Sun Times