The Man with the Golden Arm (novel)

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The Man with the Golden Arm is a novel by Nelson Algren that recounts the life of "Frankie the Machine", a card-dealer in an illicit poker game being run not far from the tenement in which he lives. The Machine is a morphine junky just back to Chicago's North Side after detoxing in the federal prison for narcotics addicts in Louisville, Kentucky, being exposed again to all the pressures, anxieties and temptations that put him there in the first place.

Published by Doubleday in November 1949, this very dark novel won the first National Book Award in 1950. One of the seminal novels of post-World War II American letters, The Man with the Golden Arm is Algren's greatest and most enduring work.

[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

In 1955, the book was made into a film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Frank Sinatra.