Book description
The Man with the Golden Arm tells the story of Frankie Machine, the golden arm dealer at a back street Chicago gambling den. Frankie reckons he's a tough guy in the Chicago underworld but finds that he's not tough enough to kick his heroin addiction. With consummate skill and a…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Man with the Golden Arm as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Algren has been called a proletarian writer. Working primarily in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1950s, he was intensely concerned with the plight of the common man. His milieux were the gambling dens, the sawdust bars, the decaying hooker-prowled streets, the beat-down police stations, the shooting galleries, the slums, the cheap walk-up flats where broken men and women fought each other in desperate battles to survive one more miserable day. His characters were the poor, the ignorant, the addicted, tramps, bums, card sharps, petty crims, accidental murderers... But in all of them he found something human, something that might…
From Matthew's list on gritty American novels.
If you love The Man with the Golden Arm...
Norman Mailer at 100
Winner of the Robert F. Lucid Award for Mailer Studies.
Celebrating Mailer's centenary and the seventy-fifth publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book illustrates how Mailer remains a provocative presence in American letters.
From the debates of the nation's founders, to the revolutionary traditions of western romanticism,…
Want books like The Man with the Golden Arm?
Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like The Man with the Golden Arm.
Share your top 3 reads of 2025!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,276
readers submitted
so far, will you?
